In The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon -- The Book of Carol, we've seen Carol (Melissa McBride) travel across the world to Europe to reunite with her best friend and long-time companion Daryl (Norman Reedus). She's flown across the Atlantic with Ash (Manish Dayal), stopping off at Greenland along the way. And upon arriving in France, she's found herself in the midst of a revolution.
Whilst Carol has been ardently trying to locate him, Daryl himself has been in the centre of the conflicts in France. He and Isabelle (Clémence Poésy) have made a little surrogate family along with Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi), a young boy whom many in the area believe to be the Messiah. Due to their steadfast determination to protect Laurent, both Daryl and Isabelle were put in prison inside Mont Saint-Michel. And just as Daryl breaks out and discovers that Isabelle was sadly lost in battle, he reunites with Carol.
Their reunion wasn't quite what fans expected. In the midst of battle, they didn't really have enough time to talk things over. Rather, they quickly embraced and continued to fight side-by-side like nothing had changed. Turns out, the reunion we saw onscreen wasn't how it originally played out in the script. "It was written originally different where she finds me in jail," Reedus told Entertainment Weekly. "And we talked about changing it."
Ultimately, it was Reedus who suggested the change. He wanted to show that Daryl still needs to fight; there was no time for pleasantries. It's not until after his killing spree that the surreal moment of reuniting with Carol hits him. "I wanted the emotion to be different," he explained. "Not just, 'Oh, she finds me and I'm weak.' I wanted it to start weak, and then he gets out and turns into a killing machine — and then just a record-scratch moment where it goes quiet. Everything goes on around us, but the sound goes off and it's like… 'Is this real? You’re right in front of me.' So we worked on that."
""It had to be different than you just found me. The energy had to be out of this world when it happened. It had to be frenetic — just pure adrenaline.""
As for Carol's perspective, McBride is super proud of the scene. "I thought it was just lovely," she told EW. Of course, Carol knew that Daryl was in France, whereas Daryl had no idea she was coming. "He's just working so hard to fight through all these walkers, and it had to be absolutely bizarre for him because if she's looking for him, he has no idea. And to see her of all people in the world on the other side of the world right in front of him, it had to be so strange!"
McBride also touched on the unique experience of filming inside France's iconic commune Mont Saint-Michel. Turns out, it's much tougher to film there than in the forests of Georgia. "Those shoots were brutally windy and cold, and night shoots as well!" There's no doubt the warmer weather is coming, with season 3 filming in Spain!
Catch new episodes of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol Sundays on AMC.
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