The Walking Dead star Seth Gilliam, who has played Father Gabriel since the show’s fifth season, recently opened up about receiving death threats from fans. “ver the years, what’s been surreal to me is sometimes people not being able to see fiction from reality, and assuming I was Father Gabriel and not Seth Gilliam,” he told Digital Spy. “When they question the choices the character made on the show, and started to send me death threats and stuff. That was surreal.”
Father Gabriel has grappled with his share of demons since becoming a part of the show, and many fans have grown to loathe him for his decisions. But obviously, having those feelings spill over to the actor behind the character is taking things way too far.
Luckily, there’s some good fan interaction to balance out the bad, as Gilliam’s co-star Ross Marquand (Aaron) pointed out. “It’s a great credit to the show that people take it so seriously that, you know, they really do almost elevate it to a level of Beatles-like status,” he said. “I was a fan of the show well before I got on it, but then you meet fans, and they start literally crying when you meet them, or you see someone in the cosplay of your character.”
"I had a wonderful fan in Europe who tattooed my face on her arm. I started crying because I thought, ‘My gosh, I don’t know why you want my face on your arm, but thank you. This is incredible. What an honour’."
It’s moments like that that you realize just how important this show is to so many people around the world. I’m very grateful to be a part of it. I know Seth is. We all are.
This isn’t the first time fans have blamed an actor for a character’s actions
Unfortunately, the flip side where fans blame actors for things their characters do is also pretty common. Take the case of Game of Thrones star Jack Gleeson, who played the vile Joffrey Baratheon. While audiences loved to hate him, his fellow cast members always spoke highly of him, vouching for his kindness and how he couldn’t be more different than the character he played.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, fan interactions aren’t quite what they used to be, but the cast and crew of The Walking Dead have adjusted, even if that means “putting on some kind of astronaut suit” to move around the set.
The Walking Dead season 11 is currently in production. In the meantime, AMC is airing new episodes of season 10, ending that run with the highly anticipated “Here’s Negan” episode. So far, so good:
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h/t NME