The Walking Dead: Norman Reedus breaks down that Daryl vs Alpha fight

On the most recent episode of The Walking Dead, “Stalker,” zombie apocalypse survivor Daryl (Norman Reedus) and face-wearing clan leader Alpha (Samantha Morton) had a brutal one-on-one fight, with each character taking their lumps. By and large, the duel ended in a draw, but it was thrilling to watch. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Reedus broke it all down.

“The fight itself was kind of rough because Samantha had some injuries and so she couldn’t do certain things,” Reedus recalled. “And so that was really difficult. I had an injury as well, so it was a rough episode physically for me, for her, for everybody. And then the emotional stuff, you know, there has to be an equal playing field. So we messed with that for a whole bunch and we changed it to I turn around and I fight. And then Samantha would come in and make it her own.”

Reedus recounts how different it was fighting Alpha than fighter her second-in-command, Beta (Ryan Hurst) back in season 9. “You know, she’s got a different fighting style than me, and hers is sneaky. She uses the walkers to her advantage, so if she can surround me with walkers where I’m fighting, then she gets these cuts in and basically just bleeds me out like an animal and then tracks me to the spot.”

"I thought it was such an interesting way to have a fight scene, because I just had the Beta fight scene where I’m fighting with the Mountain, and then to have a different sort of fighting technique — it’s just so snake-like and sneaky and it’s like a cat playing with a mouse. I thought it was really interesting."

Quality Game of Thrones reference there, Reedus.

Watching the sequence, Daryl and Alpha’s fighting styles look quite similar, with both more than willing to use their surroundings to defeat their opponent.

At one point during their fight, Alpha blinds Daryl. From that point on, showrunner Angela Kang chose to show us the action through Daryl’s rapidly obscuring point of view:

"That was an idea that Angela and I worked with, and the more disadvantages and confused I am, it’s really that cat playing with a mouse sort of feel to it — like, I’m going to bleed you open. I wipe that blood away and I look up and she’s not anywhere around me and she’s watching me. And then she sort of relishes the fact that I’m moving onto the other side. It’s super creepy. I thought it was a very cool way for she and I to go to battle."

For her part, Kang told EW the decision to show the fight from Daryl’s point of view came about later in the process. “Oh, you know what? The funny thing is, is that sequence changed a few times in the course of things,” she said. “I think that it came out of discussion with my writer Jim Barnes. We were trying to fake something actually. He was like, ‘What if we, in the story, have this bloody vision, because otherwise why doesn’t Daryl just kill Alpha right away?’ We had fun with it in post because it gave us an opportunity to do something that we haven’t really done before.”

"But it came out of this idea of in the choreography, which was very complicated: How is it that Daryl doesn’t see Alpha? And we’re like, “Oh no, she would slice him to make it so that he can’t easily see.” She’s in a cat and mouse and he’s like, “I just want to kill you.” So these two people have different fighting styles in this fight, so we’re negotiating between the two of them. We had a little fun with doing some new types of VFX and the sequence."

Kang also explained the thought process behind pitting Alpha and Daryl against each other in the first place. “It was actually something that we questioned like, ‘Should we?’ And then we’re like, ‘We really want to put these two in a scene,’ because Daryl was the one that Alpha took to the edge of the cliff and kind of said, ‘Here’s my horde,’ basically. So it feels like as all these things are spinning out and Carol is just so determined to take out the Whisperers and the threat of the horde and everything that crashing these two leaders together, it felt like it would be a good time to do it.”

Samantha Morton as Alpha, Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon – The Walking Dead _ Season 10, Episode 10 – Photo Credit: Jace Downs/AMC

By the end of the fight, Daryl was in bad shape, and had to pull a knife out of his leg in order to kill a walker, knowing full well it would probably cause him to bleed out. “Yeah, it was very slippery,” Reedus recalled. “You know, it’s one thing when you have like, a 180-pound zombie trying to fight with you. It’s another thing when you’re covered in blood and you’re trying to fight back and you are just slipping all over you like a slip and slide. It was a big red water slide. It was just insane.”

Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon – The Walking Dead _ Season 10, Episode 10 – Photo Credit: Jackson Lee Davis/AMC

“And then you have the whole sort of emotional and psychological sort of passing onto the other sides,” he continued. “Your breath goes and you’re trying to listen to the dialogue and talk back as you’re sort of fading into the darkness at the same time. It was an exhausting episode. What am I talking about? They’re all exhausting!”

Christian Serratos as Rosita Espinosa, Ryan Hurst as Beta – The Walking Dead _ Season 10, Episode 10 – Photo Credit: Bob Mahoney/AMC

The other major event in “Stalker” was Beta attacking Alexandria after sneaking in through a tunnel the Whisperer spy Dante prepared earlier in the season. “My writer Jim Barnes had this great idea of doing a classic horror movie in the walls of Alexandria, where Beta is stalking our people,” Kang explained. “I was like, ‘I love this idea, but how does he get in?’ So we threw out a lot of ideas. I actually think it might have been that I was like, ‘You know what would be so great is I love the idea of him coming through a grave,’ but Jim and the writers solved it and was like, ‘Yeah, if Dante created this back door because he was screwing things up for them.’ He killed this woman Cheryl and then he dug the grave‚because who’s going to look in a grave? We also wanted to make sure our people didn’t look dumb either. Once they knew that Dante had been sabotaging things in Alexandria, they would have looked. But you’re not going to check in a grave necessarily.”

"It just came about from a lot of the conversations of, ‘How do we make sure that our people are protected and they just didn’t miss something obvious? And how do we also make the Whisperers clever, because they are really good bad villains?’ It’s in a fun way that all these things ever developed, amongst the writers in the room. It was all sort of a group project, to figure it out, and just a good image."

Finally, Kang talked a little about what’s in store for the rest of the season. “Alpha has had this confrontation with her daughter and we heard Michonne say early in the season, ‘We got to make sure Lydia stays safe because she’s some protection for us basically.’ So now everything’s going to change, and this war with the Whisperers is really going to heat up. In the next episode, we’re going to see what happens when our people are convinced that the Whisperers are on their way and that really becomes the major story going forward. And then all of the fallout from that happens as our two societies really clash in a big way.”

That looks like some real medieval sh*t. The Walking Dead airs on Sunday nights, only on AMC.

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