Spoilers for The Walking Dead are below.
Sunday night’s episode of The Walking Dead featured one of the most unpredictable moments from the comic books, and it was just as magnificent as I’d have hoped. No, I’m not talking about the big death, which put a twist on the source material. I’m referring to the newly confident and courageous Eugene chomping down on Dwight’s genitals in an effort to turn the tables on the Saviors. (It worked.) It sounds like the cast was ready for that moment to happen, too, and actor Josh McDermitt explained how several co-stars made the day’s shoot more fitting.
We laughed a lot about it when the cameras weren't rolling but the gravity of the situation was a nice balance to that. Norman Reedus and Christian Serratos and a few others pitched in and got a hot dog truck to come on set that day and we were laughing about that. Norman joked, 'I wanted to make sure everyone was biting a wiener today!'
Norman Reedus is definitely not someone known for modest subtlety. But in most cases, and especially this one, that’s precisely what makes the actor such a fan favorite part of this show. Because really, how many people are going to do something quite like this? That answer’s low number may indeed be because hardly anyone has the chance to celebrate someone biting down on someone else’s crotch, but that doesn’t take away from the superiority that renting a hot dog truck earned Reedus and the rest.
I have to assume the truck was way out of sight when that particular scene was being filmed, since Eugene probably wouldn’t have looked so stressed out and angry in the moment. It’s hard to be a clever victim when you’re looking at what might be the least feasible vehicle imaginable in the post-apocalypse, especially if the word “weiner” keeps bouncing around the skull. Sucks that this might be the closest Eugene gets to an actual romance.
The scene, which you can watch below, was quite close to how things played out in the source material. It was less understandable in live-action why Dwight didn’t just start slamming Eugene in the face when the bitter bite happened, especially since things didn’t get quite as bloody as they were in the comic. But I can’t talk about it too much, or I’ll get woozy.
Josh McDermitt also shared with ComicBook that he’d been pushing showrunner Scott Gimple to bring the moment to audiences since Season 4, usually by texting him the appropriate frames from the comic, but said Gimple was hesitant to do it because he didn’t think McDermitt had the patience for it. I certainly hope that scene didn’t take 400 takes over the course of a week in order to get it right. And if it did, I hope they kept a bunch of those hot dogs to survive on.
The Walking Dead airs Sunday nights on AMC.
