The Walking Dead: New Community In Season 7 Will Be The Biggest

While everyone is obsessing over Negan’s kill, they’re missing the fact that the world of The Walking Dead is going to explode in other ways with its seventh season. In addition to the Hilltop and Negan’s Sanctuary, a new community will come into the mix which will be larger than any we have known before it.

That community is The Kingdom. Comic book fans know the community well, along with its leader Ezekiel and his pet tiger, Shiva. Both characters will be introduced by the third hour of Walking Dead’s seventh season but, until now, very little has been known about the new group which will, surprisingly, turn out to be friendly.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer and visual effects master from The Walking Dead opened up about the new group.

It’s the biggest community that we’ve ever come upon. Carol and Morgan show up there and it’s thriving, and it’s alive, and it’s vibrant. And even when I directed the episode, when I was editing it, it was The Walking Dead version of The Wizard of Oz. If the outside is a black and white, dull, dead world, the inside is vibrant and colorful and whimsical and alive, and it’s all led by a dude with a scepter and a f—ing tiger named Ezekiel. So the script had a very strange tenor to it, because it was very unlike anything that we had done in The Walking Dead, ever.

You have this guy walking around and people are calling him King Ezekiel, and you have these Biblical quotes that are on display all over the Kingdom, and people follow him. And at first glance you look at this and you go, “This can’t be real. There’s got to be something that’s f—ed up about it,” because there’s no way that this place could have existed, but that’s the beauty of Ezekiel. He recognized, very much like the people in Alexandria, that they need someone to follow, and they need someone to lead them. And Ezekiel took that opportunity and created this larger-than-life person that people can follow and people can look up to.

So think about being out in the world: They’ve heard about this guy Rick, that he’s ruthless and he went up against Negan, and heard about Negan’s baseball bat that he calls Lucille and he bashes people’s heads in with it. And I heard about this guy Ezekiel, and he’s got white dreadlocks and a big duster, and he has a tiger. I mean, it’s so much about propaganda and about how they hear about each other. So Ezekiel has built up a mystique about himself and about his community, and in doing so created a place where his world can flourish.

Given the size of Alexandria upon Rick and company’s arrival, the Kingdom must be pretty formidable if it is “the biggest community we’ve ever come upon.” Don’t forget about the Governor’s Woodbury, either.

As for how Ezekiel’s tiger will work, Nicotero was will to spill the beans there, too.

It’s definitely a mix. We started building at the end of February, and I have a tremendous advantage, which is experience with animatronic animals starting way back with Dances with Wolves. So we created the character and the forms digitally, and then output those into full-size standing and sitting animatronic tigers. And then we’ll be supplementing multiple shots. I would say a good portion of it, the majority of it, will be animatronic.

And then we will digitally augment with either moving eyes or moving tail, or we will have a few shots if the creature has to walk, take several steps forward, or turn around, or roar, going from a neutral expression to a roaring expression, we’ll do those shots digitally. But it’s been a very collaborative effort between myself and digital effects and [showrunner Scott M. Gimple] to dial in just the right patternings, the right saturation of color, the right movements.

It’s that kind of thing, that if you study anything for too long you’ll start to realize that it’s being operated by puppeteers, so understanding that it’s not the star of any particular shot, but it just has to be present in the scene just like the other actors. And when it comes time for it to do something, we will make it do that, and then it will be sort of integrated into each particular sequence.

Originally, Ezekiel and Shiva were planned for introduction in the third episode of Season 7. However, the synopsis for episodes 2 & 3 of the coming run has prompted speculation of the episodes being swapped. The introduction to Ezekiel would be a much more lighthearted episode than continued aftermath of Negan’s kill but we all know The Walking Dead likes to keep its foot on the audience’s throat and never let up when it comes to breaking our hearts.

The Walking Dead will return for its seventh season on October 23 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC. For complete coverage and insider info all season long, follow @BrandonDavisBD on Twitter.