The Walking Dead’s Sarah Wayne Callies Reveals First Look at New Project With Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Former Walking Dead star Sarah Wayne Callies teases Aftershock, her previously announced full-cast fiction audio thriller featuring the voices of Stranger Things star David Harbour and The Walking Dead‘s Jeffrey Dean Morgan. The narrative podcast scripted by and starring Callies features three female leads, including characters described by Callies as a “16-year-old Black girl and a Hawaiian woman who’s a Hawaiian activist.” The new project, revealed by the Lori Grimes actress while promoting since-cancelled NBC drama Council of Dads in January, was recorded remotely amid the COVID-19 pandemic and has now wrapped “production”:

“Aftershock is a narrative podcast I wrote — we’ve been recording from home with a truly extraordinary cast of friends & former colleagues,” Callies wrote on Instagram, where she shared the first behind-the-scenes look captured while recording the drama. Promising future updates as Aftershock undergoes editing and mixing, Callies teased, “Guess who’s on the other side of this scene?”

Since starring on the first three seasons of The Walking Dead, Callies stepped behind the camera to direct episodes of Colony and Unspeakable. She also starred in both projects in a lead role.

Callies previously revealed she nearly quit acting before boarding Council of Dads, a family drama modeled after This Is Us.

“I want to be a storyteller, whether it’s acting, directing, writing or producing,” Callies said during a promotional appearance for her new series earlier this year. “I’m interested in telling the kinds of stories that I’ve always wanted to be a part of. I grew up in Hawaii so I grew up around a lot of people who weren’t white. I grew up around a lot of different cultural mythologies and religious mythologies. Then I got to Hollywood and I was watching stuff and I was like, ‘Where’s everybody I know?’”

It was that desire for more diverse storytelling that inspired Callies to write Aftershock.

“If I gotta direct that, that’s fine, write it, that’s fine, produce it, it’s all good,” Callies said at the time. “I sold a narrative podcast. It’s like a radio drama. … Dave Harbour’s going to be in it. Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s going to be in it. I’ve got a bunch of my friends and so we’ve been writing and recording that, so I’m staying busy.”

Callies recently appeared on Morgan’s at-home chat show, Friday Night In with The Morgans, which he hosts with wife and actress Hilarie Burton Morgan. The socially distant AMC series launched earlier this summer amid the pandemic.

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