The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus, who has played fan-favorite Daryl Dixon for all ten seasons of the hit show, admits it’s “pretty weird” when he catches sneaky fans going to extreme lengths to take pictures while he’s out in public — something that happens “every time” he leaves the house. Reedus is happy to oblige with selfies and regularly interacts with Walking Dead fans through annual appearances at San Diego Comic-Con and other conventions — even after he was bitten by a female admirer who “howled like a werewolf” after becoming overexcited — but the fan-friendly actor admits creep shots can be “super annoying.”
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“It’s not great,” Reedus told The Chicago Tribune when asked how it feels being photographed everywhere he goes. “Somebody was telling me that I was in Page Six for grocery shopping in Los Angeles, just buying things for the house [during the COVID-19 quarantine]. There’s a whole bunch of crazy stuff happening in the world and I get a call that I’m in Page Six for buying groceries? It’s not like we’re hoarding things; we have a full house of people we have to feed.”
Reedus and partner Diane Kruger are private with their first child together, the baby girl born to the couple in November 2018. When it comes to paparazzi, Reedus added, “They’re in it to make a buck. You have go, ‘Come on guys, please don’t shoot [photos of] my baby daughter. Please just cut it out.’ And they’ll do it anyway.”
In New York, photographers will be “hiding behind a pole or a parked car and I just see their shoulder and they’re kind of sneaky, like big game hunters. In California, they surround you a foot from your face and they scream your name and it’s just invasive.”
“It’s not like I’m a [jerk] to those guys. So if I’m like, ‘Come on, cut it out,’ eventually I think they feel like [creeps] and they’ll stop,” Reedus said. “And sometimes you can say, ‘OK, take a picture and then stop following me,’ and they’ll be like, ‘OK,’ because I don’t think they want to follow me, either. But some of them, I think, get off on thinking they’re hunters or something.”
With fans, Reedus prefers being asked for photos.
“If someone [a fan] is going to snap a picture on their phone I’d rather they say, ‘Hey, can I do this?’ you know what I mean? Because that’s cool, that’s fine. Everyone’s got a camera phone and everyone wants to take a picture and selfie’s I can almost deal with,” he said. “But I’m really good at knowing when someone’s pointing a camera at me and trying to be sneaky. The person that’s looking to the left but their phone’s pointing to the right, right at you, and they think that you don’t see them? That happens every time I leave the house. It’s super annoying. Or you’re sitting on an airplane and they walk by you and their iPhone is in a sharpshooter position down at their waist. That’s pretty weird to me.”
But the easygoing Reedus understands, admitting, “I’ve done the same thing — I took a photo with my phone of the back of Martin Short’s head one time on an airplane because I was like, ‘That’s Martin Short!’ Like, I get it [laughs]. I still have that photo somewhere, I’m a big Martin Short fan. But I’m sure he would have appreciated if if I had said, ‘Hey, can I take a picture of the back of your head?’”
The Walking Dead next airs the Season 10 finale, “A Certain Doom,” as a special episode later this year. For all things TWD, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.
