Ian Anthony Dale Details Tomi’s Tragic Backstory on The Walking Dead

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Sunday’s “Trust” episode of The Walking Dead. The doctor is in, and the backstory is out. Before the Commonwealth reunited Okumura siblings Tomi (Ian Anthony Dale) and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), life was a piece of cake for Tomi. Yumiko’s long-lost baker brother was content baking goodies at Elodie’s Treats and not performing life-saving surgeries as a thoracic surgeon, like the thyroidectomy that removed King Ezekiel’s (Khary Payton) tumor or the emergency appendectomy performed on Ezekiel’s old friend Theresa (Terri Joe Kennedy). More than a decade after Dr. Okumura escaped Chicago at the onset of the apocalypse, ending his high-pressure career, Tomi was happy. 

“I like my life the way it is. It’s the one gift I got out of the world falling apart,” Tomi confided in his sister earlier in Season 11. “Please, don’t ruin this for me.” (Spoiler alert: Yumiko ruined it for him.) 

After Sunday’s episode of The Walking Dead showed Dr. Tomi grieving the death of a patient with a bottle of alcohol, Dale revealed more of his character’s pre-apocalypse backstory on Talking Dead: 

“Tomi’s backstory, prior to the world falling, he was absolutely miserable as a surgeon. It was a profession that he never wanted to be a part of, but was sort of forced into due to the unrelenting pressure of his overbearing parents,” Dale said live on Talking Dead. “The job of a thoracic surgeon is a high-pressure, high-stakes type of profession where it’s life-and-death every day, multiple times a day. And as much as Tomi wished he could save every patient, that just is impossible. The losses sort of weigh heavily on him, and he also just never felt comfortable with the bureaucracy of the health care system that prioritizes one socioeconomic group over another.”

The pressures and discontentment of the job took their toll and “culminated in him abusing drugs and alcohol and burning it at both ends,” Dale explained. “That life, working as a surgeon, was extremely self-destructive.”

In “Out of the Ashes,” Tomi told Yumiko he was stranded about 20 miles north of Charleston, West Virginia when he encountered a good group of people after the outbreak. When they ended up at Ohio’s Commonwealth community, Tomi covered up his history as a thoracic surgeon to avoid assigned work at the hospital. 

“When he finds himself at the doorstep of the Commonwealth, he’s so desperate to start anew and start fresh and say goodbye to that life that he risks being turned away or incarcerated — or even worse — and lies about what he used to do in the world before,” Dale said. “He was so happy. He loved it until his sister comes along and blows up his spot [laughs].” 

Season 11 mid-season finale “Acts of God” premieres Sunday, April 10 on AMC. The Walking Dead returns with Part 3 of The Final Season later in 2022. 

Follow @CameronBonomolo on Twitter and @NewsOfTheDead for TWD Universe coverage all season long.