It's not every day that you get to appear on your favorite TV show—even for actors.
But for Grace and Frankie star Ethan Embry that day has come with his appearance on the season six premiere of The Walking Dead, and he lived to tell E! News the tale, even if—SPOILER ALERT—his character Carter didn't.
You'd think it would be bittersweet to join the cast of the AMC hit only to be offed in your first episode, but for Embry, it was just right. "To me, coming in hot and fast and leaving with a bang is almost the best of any world I could choose," he gushed. "Right now, we're in the middle of doing the second season of Grace and Frankie, and when you do a TV contract, you can only do a certain amount of episodes for another show...So the fact that it was in and out was great. To me, it lined up perfectly."
For Embry, getting the opportunity to bring Carter to life, challenge Rick (Andrew Lincoln) in the process (a big no-no!) and, ultimately, meet his maker after taking a walker chomp to the face was a dream come true. "Being a fan of the show—a couple of filmmakers get together on Sunday at our mutual friend's house and we all have a cook-out and watch the show. We've been doing that for, gosh, the last two years now," he admitted. "So, being a fan of the show and getting to do pretty much everything you could dream of on the show all in one episode? My tagline for it was I felt like I had won a sweepstakes. Like, I drank all my Ovaltine and that was my grand prize." Stars, they're just like us!
The way he sees it, Carter never stood much of a chance outside the protective walls of Alexandria. "If the show was taking place today, in our reality, Rick and Carter would've been on a more equal playing field. Carter's a capable guy," Embry said. "He can handle his own in this world, but he's living in the shelter of Alexandria and he hasn't been exposed to the things that Rick and the rest of the crew has. So, they have all progressed leaps and bounds beyond anything anyone inside of Alexandria has."
And as for his big death scene, it turns out that it was one of his first moments on set. "The death day was actually the first day I got there. That was the first thing I shot," he revealed. "It was really surreal, man, because, again, anything I can say about the experience, I experienced it through the perception of a fan. So, I get up there really early in the morning. The sun is just coming out and I'm standing on set in this country road and over the horizon, hundreds of walkers start walking to set. I'm just standing there...in the middle of the road, just a complete surreal world, and they're just walking around me."
It's not all fun and games, though. "The death scene, it's work," Embry admitted. "There are a lot of technical elements, and the zombie, he can't see anything, the actor. He's got these contacts in, he can't see a thing. So, we have all the technicalities worked out, the timing. It's a dance, really. And then the guy that's in charge of pumping the blood out of the prosthetic in my face, that whole timing has to be right. It's like a bunch of kids playing the most gloriously fun game of make believe, you know?" OK, so maybe it is all fun and games.
The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.