Steven Yeun (Glenn) didn’t put up a fight to stay on The Walking Dead

Glenn’s death remains one of the most brutal in the history of The Walking Dead, but by that point, actor Steven Yeun was ready for it to be over.

Across almost a decade on our TVs, The Walking Dead has found lots of terrifying ways to kill characters. We’ve seen cannibalism, heads on spikes, Spencer Monroe’s gruesome “guts” death…And that’s not even getting into how the show kills its zombies. Overall, these scenes make The Walking Dead one of the most brutal shows on television.

But nothing makes fans emotional quite like the season 7 premiere, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be.” In the episode, Negan finally catches up to our survivors and decides to punish them for killing his men by beating Abraham to death with Lucille, his barbed-wire covered baseball bat. After he’s killed Abraham, Daryl strikes out in anger. As a consequence, Negan retaliates by also beating Glenn to death.

Recently, actor Steven Yeun — who’d been playing Glenn since the first season — reminisced about his time on the show while talking to Riz Ahmed for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, explaining how playing the “plucky, nice guy” was beginning to feel old. “I couldn’t be stuck servicing just a genial natured guy for the rest of my career,” he said. “On the inside, I didn’t feel that way. On the inside, I can be angry, I can be vengeful. I can be all the other things, and I wanted to explore those things for myself.”

"That [nice guy] is me, and that’s not a thing I’m ashamed of — it’s just I’m more than that. And I think that over the course of the journey, I tried to expand, and I think Glenn grew to an extent alongside me."

Ultimately, that feeling meant that he didn’t raise many objections when he was told Glenn’s number was up. “There wasn’t really much of a fight on my end.”

That said, Yeun is still involved with projects based on comic books. In March, we’ll see him in Amazon Prime Video’s animated series Invincible, adapted from the comics by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman. He’ll voice protagonist Mark Grayson, aka Invincible.

The cast for this thing is crazy. Everyone is a big name. A couple of other voice actors include Mark Hamill, J.K. Simmons, Seth Rogen, Gillian Jacobs, Mahershala Ali and Ezra Miller.

We’ll always be thankful for Steven Yeun’s contributions to the world of The Walking Dead. And of course, we wish him all the best for anything else he does.

Invincible airs March 26, 2021, on Amazon Prime Video. The Walking Dead season 10 continues with six new episodes starting February 28.

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