The Walking Dead: 10 Worst Casting Mistakes

We’re now seven seasons deep into AMC’s The Walking Dead (said in requisite gravelly voice), and it’s safe to say that the vast majority of casting decisions made by TWD’s powers that be are spot on.

From main cast members like Andrew Lincoln, Melissa McBride and Lennie James to actors that played one-time characters in bottle episodes, like John Carroll Lynch’s turn as psychiatrist turned cheesemaker Eastman in Here’s Not Here, the casting and acting is by and large brilliant.

But every now and then they stumble and make some quite questionable choices indeed, creating characters that seem to serve no purpose in the show and casting actors that seem hard-pushed to bring them to life and stick out like a sore thumb amongst the show's more talented cast.

On the upside, 70% of the characters coming up are dead or presumed dead, so at least TWD had the good grace to kill off most of their casting mistakes.

The other 30%, however? It might be time to script a sticky end for them and do away with their bad acting once and for all.

Singling out the performance of a presumably non-professional extra might seem like a low blow. While it’s true that an extra’s acting by no means needs to be as good as the show’s main cast, there is actually more to the role than just hovering around in background filling out space and when an extra’s performance – however small it may be – is distractingly bad, it kind of cheapens the whole thing.

Case in point: an extra from Season 3 who shall henceforth be known as ‘Overzealous Shadowboxing Woodbury Extra’. Cast your mind back to The Suicide Kings, in which the nutjob Governor orders brothers Merle and Daryl Dixon to fight to the death for sh*ts and giggles.

While they’re being egged on by a crowd of rowdy Woodburians, there’s a particularly enthusiastic extra whose taken her blood-baying motivation a bit too far with a bit of laughable shadowboxing. She’s supposed to be showing the savagery at work below the seemingly idyllic Woodbury, but comes off looking more like a drunken T-Rex than brainwashed, jeering spectator.

She’s not the only distractingly bad Woodbury extra, of course. There’s also the would-be Woodbury defector who can’t convincingly shake her head in horror and the sleeveless top wearing dude whose fist pump is similarly over the top. But this one was bad enough to be immortalised in GIF form for evermore.