Spoilers below for Fear the Walking Dead's Season 3 premiere, for anyone who has yet to watch.
Fear the Walking Dead Season 3 kicked things off with a premiere titled "Eye of the Beholder," which seemed to be an extremely cheeky way to foreshadow the episode's grossest moment, in which Madison shanked Daniel Sharman's new character Troy Otto in the eye with a spoon. (And then proceeded to use the implanted spoon as leverage.) CinemaBlend spoke with star Kim Dickens about the episode, and she told us that big fight and its aftermath were as grueling to perform as they were impressive to watch.
It was a long sequence that we shot, but Daniel Sharman is an amazing actor. He's a new character on our show, and we just jumped in. We had a lot of specific stunts to do. We got a little banged up -- nothing that harmed anybody -- but it was quite a grueling sequence to do. We really did do 99.9 percent of it. Sometimes our stunt people will take the harder falls that are going to be a little bit more dangerous for us, but we're padded and we usually do anything that we can. It was very intricate too, that with the spoon and the eye, and the rig for the eye, and the very specific work you have to do. But it was fun. I think it was the coolest sequence, too, to read. I thought our writers must have had so much fun writing it.
Indeed, during fans' time with Madison Clark on Fear the Walking Dead, there haven't been near as many instances of "Kim Dickens unleashing a royal shit-ton of pain to someone's face" as one might have hoped. But this is a universe that Madison is adapting to, as Kim Dickens told me during our talk, and the character has come to the understanding that she can no longer avoid crossing moral boundaries in order to make her goals realized, whatever they may be. And if one of those boundaries involved the threat of scooping someone's eyeball out, she certainly did cross it.
Not that she didn't have a damned good reason to do so. When the premiere kicked off, our central family of leads were being captured and held by a group of unfamiliar soldiers. We still aren't fully aware of what these new characters are about, but we know that the Otto family is at the center of it, and that Troy Otto is far more of a distrusting lunatic than his brother Jake, played by Sam Underwood. Troy does have some charm going for him, but far more Ted Bundy than Ted Danson, and it was almost shocking that Madison needed so little time to conclude that violence would be the answer in that situation.
The fight itself wasn't too lengthy, but it was still pretty intense for a Fear the Walking Dead brawl that didn't involve walkers, and it was all the more realistic for it. (That end sequence with the walkers was also pretty pulse-pounding though.) Then after that, Kim Dickens basically had to get on Daniel Sharman's back for the rest of that scene and then the whole bit out in the open when she's convincing them to show her where they took the other protagonists. That can't have been physically comfortable for anyone, even without Sharman's face half covered with the eye rig. We're fine with Troy having back pain, but hopefully Sharman got to lay down for a while after filming.
We're definitely going to learn more information -- and that's with a capital EYE -- about the Ottos and other characters when Fear the Walking Dead airs Sunday nights on AMC at 9:00 p.m. ET. While waiting to see more, check out what else Kim Dickens told us about Season 3, and what she thought about that big shock in Episode 2, and then head to our summer TV schedule to see what other new and returning shows are premiering soon.
