Okay so Axel wasn't exactly a major character, but he was heading that way. He and Carol were becoming close, we were starting to learn a little more about the jovial former inmate, then BAM, his head is gone. There was a rumor that Axel would be next to buy the farm but that was supposed to happen last week, so I think we kinda figured he was safe, for a while longer at least. His death was just the beginning of one of the most explosively tense scenes in the show's history, as The Governor arrived at the prison for a littler payback. Speaking to EW, Glen Mazzara explains why Axel had to be the one to go..
"That was a really tough choice because we had to have the Governor exact some revenge. If he just shot up the prison without resulting in someone’s death it would have looked completely impotent. So now you start looking at characters and which character is going to go. And we evaluated almost every character — is it time to kill this character or that character? Unfortunately, the axe fell Axel’s way. It was tough because there may have been more story with him. I think we were just finding that character. I loved what he added. It was just that someone had to go and that was a really, really tough choice. That was something that I wrestled with almost more than say, Lori, because I knew we were getting story out of Lori’s death. So this was a different kind of death that was tied into the existing story but it didn’t prompt further story. I did really feel that loss. That was a tough one. I wish…. I didn’t see another way out of it."
For the rest of the interview click the link below.
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Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.