Inside dramatic ‘Daryl Dixon’ zombie Sophia flashback (exclusive)

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the season 2 premiere of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol, “La gentillesse des étrangers.”

Viewers may have experienced a bit of déjà vu on the season 2 premiere of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol when the spinoff show did a newly shot flashback scene to one of the original series’ most infamous moments — Barnageddon. And the star and director of the scene experienced the exact same thing.

The flashback occurred as Carol (Melissa McBride) watched the man she would soon dupe into flying her to France, Ash (Manish Dayal), open some barn doors. That simple action triggered Carol into a flashback from season 2 of The Walking Dead, when the barn doors on Hershel’s farm were finally opened and out walked Carol’s daughter Sophia (Madison Lintz)… as a zombie.

The original Walking Dead scene — with Carol collapsing on the ground in despair, only to be caught by Norman Reedus’ Daryl — is among the most shocking and heartbreaking in franchise history. But instead of just showing the original scene now as a memory in Carol’s mind, the team behind Daryl Dixon decided to recreate it to show a modern-day Carol peering into the barn as her zombified daughter — now played by a different actress — lumbers out.

So what was it like for McBride to get back into that Barnageddon headspace? “What surprised me was how quickly it was right there,” the actress tells Entertainment Weekly. “It was a little confusing going through the night in the present tense into the daytime in the flashback. Having to carry the emotion through each of it was a little challenging. But I loved playing that scene.”

Though McBride was the original impetus for examining Carol’s survivor’s guilt in the new spinoff series, even she was taken aback when she first heard about re-staging the Hershel’s barn scene. “I was surprised when I read it in the script. I was just like, ‘We’re really going to do that. We’re going to have a whole flashback and recreate the whole thing?’”

It helped that the scene (and season premiere) was directed by Greg Nicotero, one of the few people that was actually there for filming the original scene in the “Pretty Much Dead Already” episode. “It really was wild to recreate that,” Nicotero tells EW. “I had so many memories of like, ‘Oh, we need hay here, and there’s a body there. I remember putting blood over there, and then there was a dead zombie here.’ And so it was really kind of strange standing there looking at the side of the barn. I took me right back to how I was feeling being there when we shot it. That’s such a powerful moment.”

And the moment definitely registered with McBride when she first walked onto the Barnageddon 2.0 set. “Coming up to see the set and seeing how they had recreated the whole thing was kind of oddly magical,” she says. “Greg and the set designer and everybody did such an amazing job to recreate that. And the little girl playing Sophia looked so much like her. Everything was just so similar that this was all right there for Carol.”

The connection McBride feels with both her Walking Dead O.G. costar and director were also key. “Just looking at Norman and Greg, I always think how long we’ve been together. And Greg is still as excited about doing this show as he was way back when, so it was special to me. If that scene was going to happen, I can’t think of a better way for it to have happened. Having Greg here as we filmed that so far away from home — it was strange and beautiful and magical in a way, just because of the journey we’ve shared thus far.”

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Nicotero also reveals to EW some of the tricks they tried on the reshoot that did not end up in the final episode. “We had this really great transition where she’s walking up to Ashe’s Barn,” the director says. “And we did this great lighting effect where all this light hits the side of the barn, but then you cut to Carol and she’s standing there, and it’s daytime. We recreated the shots that [original “Pretty Much Dead Already” director Michelle McLaren] did when she directed that episode, and hired a double of Sophia.”

Nicotero also reveals that the last shot of Sophia touching Carol’s arm was not originally in the script, and was improvised on the day of filming. “At one point, we did one of the takes,” the director recounts, “and as the girl got closer and closer, I said to myself: What’s really interesting is in our new version, Rick isn’t there to walk up and pull the trigger. So what happens if Rick’s not there? Sophia keeps coming forward. And what does Carol really want? She wants to be able to touch her daughter again. She wants to be able to interact with her. So we did a version where this little Sophia touches Carol’s arm, and she looks down as if it’s almost like that’s all she really needs. And then she’s dramatically pulled out of that hallucination.”

That touching scene of the… well, touching, served to set up the emotional stakes for the coming season. Says McBride in her typically understated fashion, “It turned out pretty well, I thought.”

New episodes of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.