Yvette Nicole Brown Cameos on TWD

By Cameron Bonomolo

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Sunday's "Outpost 22" episode of The Walking Dead. "Milton has underestimated us since day one. We are gonna get our kids, take back our home, and make it right," Maggie (Lauren Cohan) said to end Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead, declaring war against the corrupt Governor Milton (Laila Robins). "And Pamela is never gonna see it coming." But that's not the only blindside in the episode. The credits begin with "Special appearance by Yvette Nicole Brown," a star of the sitcom Community who is perhaps best known to Walking Dead fans as a recurring guest on AMC after-show Talking Dead.

Brown doesn't physically appear, but that's her voice heard over the radio in the final minutes of Sunday's episode. After spending the episode trying to find their friends and kids taken by the Commonwealth, Maggie, Daryl (Norman Reedus), Carol (Melissa McBride), Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), and Rosita (Christian Serratos) come together to locate the mysterious Outpost 22.

Posing as the last-surviving soldier of an ambush, Rosita radios in a distress signal to Outpost 22. The responding soldier is Brown, whose instructions lead our heroes to their destination: the Alexandria Safe-Zone, which the Commonwealth claimed and turned into Outpost 22.

"I was super sad that the show was ending, and told [showrunner] Angela Kang and [executive producer] Scott Gimple that I wished I could be a part of the show in some way before they wrapped," Brown told EW. "Traveling to Atlanta to perhaps be a walker wasn't possible, so they came up with the idea of me being a part of the show via voiceover, and I couldn't have been more excited to do that. I didn't know if I'd be credited, and didn't know if my fellow fans would be able to tell it was me if I wasn't."

Brown added: "I'm surprised that quite a few knew it was me immediately and am humbled that I was credited – I would've been happy being an eternal Easter egg on my favorite show."

READ MORE ▸ Is "Designation Two" the CRM on The Walking Dead? ▸ TWD Confirms Rosita and Gabriel's Relationship Status

Brown has appeared on two dozen episodes of Talking Dead, served as moderator of the show's Season 9 panel at San Diego Comic-Con, and hosted The Walking Dead Universe Family Hangout when the convention went virtual in 2020. Most recently, Brown served as co-host of The Walking Dead: Last Mile, a weekly interactive event on Facebook.

Yvette is a great friend of the family," Kang told EW. "She is such a great supporter. She's an amazing actor in her own right, and she was open to maybe doing something for us."

The zombie drama usually keeps cameos in the Walking Dead family. Director and executive producer Greg Nicotero has made multiple cameos as walkers throughout the show's eleven seasons, and the son of Walking Dead actors Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton Morgan made a bite-sized cameo earlier in Season 11. 

So why haven't there been more celebrity cameos on The Walking Dead? Dave Bautista — the WWE wrestler turned actor who stars as Drax in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, also appearing in Zack Snyder's zombie heist movie Army of the Dead — tried to cameo as a zombie on the show "for years," only to be turned away for being "too big."

"Without getting into it, through the years there have been various celebrities who've been like, 'I'd be interested in doing a cameo on the show or being walker on the show,'" Kang explained. "But sometimes that gets distracting in a show like this. It works better for other kinds of shows. But in the case of an ADR [automated dialogue replacement], it's just a voice that's coming over a radio, and she's a great voice actress. She does that as part of her portfolio of acting work."

"Outpost 22" is available to stream now on AMC+.

Follow @CameronBonomolo and @NewsOfTheDead on Twitter for TWD Universe coverage all season long. New episodes of The Walking Dead's final season premiere Sundays on AMC and AMC+.

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