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The Walking Dead killed a lot of people when it was on. Some deaths were earned, some felt unfair, others were kind of funny, but not many stuck with the show’s audience like watching Steven Yeun’s Glenn die. As in the comics, Glenn gets beaten to death with Negan’s spiked baseball bat, and it was a pretty big deal at the time, to a point that a newspaper in Arkansas actually published an obituary for him days later.
Some people jumped off the show once he got knocked off, and even former leading man Andrew Lincoln admitted the show might’ve crossed the line with Glenn. Talking to Empire Magazine about his time on the show, he said that was when the show “over-egged the omelette. [That death] may have lingered too much.” The actual filming of the death was also pretty intense, he added, particularly for Negan actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Lincoln recalled Morgan doing a monologue in front of everyone and being “one of the [show’s] most unpleasant characters.” As the other actors were bound on their knees and crying, Morgan asked him if this was normal, to which Lincoln’s Rick Grimes confirmed, “Yeah, everybody just keeps going.”
There was a lot of furor of Glenn’s death at the time, not helped by the fact that he’d had a fake-out death just a few episodes earlier. You know the story after that: Lincoln left the show a few seasons later (both he and Yeun returned for the series finale, either through archive material or newly shot footage), and eventually returned for the recent miniseries The Ones Who Live. Yeun, meanwhile, went on to headline projects like Nope, Beef, and Invincible, and was at one point going to be the Sentry in the Thunderbolts movie before bowing out. Still, it hasn’t been that long since the original Walking Dead show ended, so it’s not likely anyone’s gonna be forgetting Glenn’s end anytime soon.
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