The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Stars Address Heartbreaking Ending (Exclusive)

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live is making a habit of killing off new characters as fast as it introduces them. Spoilers for the latest TWD spinoff follow. With its first episode, Craig Tate’s Okafor was brought into the series before an explosive sendoff wrapped up his story. In Episode 2, more new faces met their doom. However, one character has stood out by comparison to others when it comes to emotional reactions from the fans, a testament to the great writing on the series and the performance by Matthew August Jeffers.

Jeffers, who previously starred in a stage play with Michonne actress Danai Gurira, joined The Ones Who Live as a new character by the name of Nat. Episode 2 was his first and only episode of the series, getting killed off by a CRM soldier just as Rick and Michonne reunited. However, the role being limited to one episode did not mean the audience was not thoroughly invested in Nat’s survival and devastated by his loss, a topic covered in the week’s breakdown and review video. Jeffers spoke with ComicBook.com about the heartbreaking end to Nat’s story.

“Scott really tricked me because in that scene where Nat’s like, ‘I can come with you, we can do it together.’ I was like, ‘Oh, great! Let’s go! LFG!. Let’s go on this journey’. And, then, six pages later, gutted really gutted,” Jeffers said. “I was like, ‘Oh…’ As an actor, yeah, that’s disappointing. You want to continue to tell the story, especially when it’s a character that you get really excited about, instantly fall in love with. And so I immediately went to YouTube and searched how to die on screen. I go to YouTube for everything and just watched people dying on screen for a while, and I was like, all right, this is going to be challenging, but I’ve never done it before.”

While Nat’s story came to an abrupt end, his legacy will continue. “I think Nat’s lighter is emblematic of a fire that was given to him from someone who loved him and literally lit his fire,” Jeffers said. “I think a lot of people need to know that, that sometimes it’s okay that you don’t have your own fire, that someone can give you that lighter to keep you going. And when he gives that to Michonne or when Michonne carries that fire, it’s this torch. It’s this literal baton of love and care that people pass from one to the other. And especially in this desolate world, what’s more beautiful than that is something that keeps that fire going. Som I hope that that’s the takeaway.”

14 years since The Walking Dead premiered on AMC, it is not uncommon to find that everywhere Rick and Michonne go, there are casualties. The two characters continue to fight for the people around them but constantly find themselves surrounded by loss in this post-apocalyptic setting, with The Ones Who Live showcasing that for both characters separately in its first two episodes. Gurira opened up about how Nat’s legacy and the others lost along the way is carried with Michonne moving forward. 

“I don’t think they see as it where we go, things go bad,” Gurira said of Michonne and Rick. “We’re the ones who live, which we had in the coda and thankfully we got to make our title of this show, it’s not just about the ones who are alive. It’s about those who are living inside of us, those that we carry their souls, their spirits. The connection that we have to them, rather, is very real. The essence of who they were and the effect they had on us and the way that they contributed to everyone and to the group and to the life force of all of us… for any of us to survive, we’ve all survived.”