Season 7 of The Walking Dead opened on a tragic note as new bad guy Negan and his trusty baseball Lucille brutally beat poor Glenn to death in front of all his loved ones. Glenn was one of the few characters who had been around from the very first season, so it was quite a blow for fans and the cast of the show when he was killed off. Danai Gurira, who plays Michonne on The Walking Dead, has come out and revealed the very special way that the ladies of the show bade Steven Yeun a farewell, and it just so happened to involve some vintage Backstreet Boys. Here's how she described how they said goodbye:
The cast of The Walking Dead generally deals with the departure of one of their own by getting together for a "death dinner" to celebrate their time together, but Danai Gurira and the other actresses clearly weren't content with simply a dinner for Steven Yeun. So, naturally, they got together, dressed in all white, learned some choreography, and performed the endlessly amazing Backstreet Boys hit "I Want It That Way." As you do in times of emotional difficulty.
While Danai Gurira's story on Live with Kelly and Ryan indicates that folks in the rest of the cast were a bit baffled by their performance, I know I would totally pre-order the DVD set for Season 7 if I knew the ladies of The Walking Dead would be performing "I Want It That Way," especially after the way the Season 6 cliffhanger played games with the hearts of perfect fans everywhere. A death dinner simply wasn't all the cast had to give, and they believed he deserved more than that at the time. They had to express the shapes of their hearts with a larger than life performance that put a fun spin on how inconsolable and incomplete everybody felt when the producers made the call to kill off Glenn.
Even if Gurira and Co. didn't want to lose him now, they just wanted him to know that he meant a great deal to them. He was the one who got them channeling their inner boy band singers. I only hope the performance went straight to Yeun's heart after he discovered how much the women of The Walking Dead had it going on. It sounds like they were pretty authentic to the "I Want It That Way" music video with their costumes and choreography. In case you need a reminder, prepare yourself for a blast from the past and check out the original 1999 music video:
Danai Gurira and the other actresses probably didn't rent out an airplane hangar for their performance or master the art of the slow-motion strut, but it seems that they put in a fair amount of work to give a fitting farewell to Steven Yeun. You can catch the women of The Walking Dead back in the thick of the zombie apocalypse action this fall on AMC. Our rundown of what we know so far about Season 8 can give you a peek ahead, and our summer TV premiere schedule can give you an idea of what you can watch to pass the time until the premiere.
