The Walking Dead’s Josh McDermitt on the loss of his friend

The Power Hour crew of Matthew Sardo and Amanda Borges spoke to Josh McDermitt, who plays Eugene on The Walking Dead.

How do the cast members take it when they find out a member of the cast is getting killed off?

“You know it’s really tough, it becomes kind of a cliche thing to say or maybe for people to hear is we’re a giant family. I’ve been on other tv shows where you don’t really…enjoy going to work, you enjoy the crew and maybe a few cast members but maybe there’s a few stinkers in the bunch and you’re kind of just like ‘Ah whatever.’ But with this show, everyone is such a tight knit group we have several text message chains going, and if someone gets killed off, then we’ll kind of just remove them from that chain so that they don’t keep getting bombarded with text messages. We’re constantly texting each other all the time and emailing and getting together to watch the show and dong that sort of thing and it’s really sad when you lose a family member. It has nothing to do with ‘Oh they may not work again’ or anything like that it’s just we don’t get to hang out with our friends. They don’t get to come to work and play with us anymore. It’s really tough I mean I’ll be honest, I didn’t know Emily Kinney (Beth) very well. But I’ve gotten to know her just in hanging out and that sort of thing and that hit me just as hard…can I say it? It’s a spoiler. It hit me just as hard as when we lost Chad Coleman last night, who I’m close with. So it doesn’t matter who it is, it hits us all really hard.”

What scene have you done on The Walking Dead that you’re most proud of?

“Oh wow. What I’m most proud of, I think probably the admission of Eugene’s lie. With that it wasn’t so much about for me, it wasn’t so much about me being able to spill the secret and being the focal point and the focus of the attention, but the fact that everyone in that scene was working together to pull off a really good scene and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the other actors there. (We broke up how we shot the scene.) We shot the scene where Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) was strong arming Eugene down the road and he pushes Rosita (Christian Serratos) out of the way and punches are being thrown and that sort of thing. And then we went to lunch and we came back and shot the part about Euguene admitting the truth and instantly without even questioning and saying ‘hey do you want to do this,’ we just actually picked it up from when we were throwing punches and running down the road again instead of coming from a zero starting point in a sense. And it just got us back into it instantly. We were just working on the same page as a collective group and I think that’s probably the scene I’m most proud of to date that we’ve worked on because it was pretty amazing.”