‘Fear the Walking Dead’: Jenna Elfman Discusses This Week’s Deadly Episode

Spoilers for this week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead, “Sonny Boy”, past this point, but it was another deadly one. Not only did John Dorie, Sr. (Keith Carradine) sacrifice his life to get Baby Mo to Morgan (Lennie James), but Howard (Omid Abtahi) was tossed over the side of The Tower. And Charlie (Alexa Nisenson) is about five minutes away from dying of radiation poisoning.

For Jenna Elfman, who plays June on the show and has lost her second John Dorie in the past few seasons (after the death of the original last year), suffering all this massive loss isn’t a chance to break down, it’s a chance to grow.

“This is going to be a real wake up call for June, because a person can only take so much loss before they make a giant shift on how they’re going to operate, especially in an apocalyptic, changing environment,” Elfman told Decider on the episode. “They have to readjust if they can. Immediately just heal.”

In the hour, someone inside of Strand’s (Colman Domingo) Tower stronghold is forming a resistance, placing illicit walkies everywhere. Turns out, the resistance — surprising nobody — is June and Grace (Karen David), who are attempting to get Baby Mo out of the Tower, and back to Morgan. In the midst of that, John Dorie Sr. plants a walkie in Howard’s quarters, casting doubt on Strand’s right-hand man, and allowing him the chance to get Strand’s ear.

By episode’s end, though, John Dorie has had a change of heart, and helps June and Grace get Baby Mo back to Morgan, after throwing Howard off the Tower himself. He does it by sifting through a herd of undead, though, and dies as June and others look on.

To find out more about how this loss will impact June, filming a scene waist-deep in water with walker grasping at her the whole time, and what’s next as the season enters its final episodes, read on.

Decider: This is the second John Dorie that June has lost… How is that going to impact her going forward?

Jenna Elfman: It’s really hard after so much loss at a certain point, to just eat it and not ruffle feathers, or be safe, or just think that you’re going to suffer in silence. Because at a certain point, it really affects other people if you’re not living per your own integrity. It’s just the way it is. And that’s a lesson I’ve learned in my own life as well.

This is going to be a real wake up call for June, because a person can only take so much loss before they make a giant shift on how they’re going to operate, especially in an apocalyptic, changing environment. They have to readjust if they can. Immediately just heal. I don’t know, it changes you. Lots of loss changes a person. It’ll either do you in, or you just pull up bigger bootstraps with bigger handles and bolster yourself up and gain more courage because you have to. And I think that’s probably the direction we’re headed with June.

On a more practical level, this is even a pretty brutal episode, because you lose Keith Carradine from the cast. You lose Omid Abtahi. Alexa Nisenson is not looking long for this world, the way Charlie is in this episode. So I know this par for the course of the Walking Dead franchise, but what is it like to have this nonstop culling of the cast?

I remember when Keith showed up on a day of filming on an earlier episode, and he had just gotten the call and found out that there was going to be that shift for Dorie. And I got, I don’t know, a hole in my stomach. I just felt so sad, and I felt bad for June, and myself. You live so close to these characters that there’s funny gray area where you bleed over between yourself and the character. And I went, “Wow, this is June feeling guilty about Charlie, because she didn’t fully stand up to Omid’s character and let Charlie go out there instead of 100% preventing that.” And June had a wake up call from that, and then to find out, well, Dorie went with her or went out in that same path. It’s just too much. So June’s going to make a fundamental shift of something for herself because she cannot… And won’t keep going like this. That’s not who she is, and it’s not how she can continue to exist.

Last time we lost John Dorie, he was almost immediately replaced by John Dorie Sr. Is there a third John Dorie out there that we’re going to meet down the road?

[Laughs] I don’t know.

Maybe John Dorie III or something like that, I guess we’ll see what happens.

Or a long lost cousin.

Jumping back a little further in the episode, the sequence in the flooded basement with the walkers, plus a crying baby… There’s so much going on there. What was it actually like filming that sequence in the episode?

That was a very challenging sequence to film. There was so much to structuring the blocking with the stunt walkers, the timing of floods coming in with camera where you land. Because I had to fend off all the walkers, and it sounds tedious to hear about it, but it’s so specific because if you push them too far, they’re not in the frame, but pushing them to where it feels like you’re doing the job that June needs to do, but keeping them in the frame, not falling out of frame too much… And all of them going underwater and coming up and their makeup and the gate… It was a lot.

And then, they need to adjust the camera. So you slosh up the stairs, walk down the stairs, slosh across the stage to your chair where you’re flooding your environment with the water, that’s dripping from your entire costume. And then the on and off with the armor on my arms, the props people, it was like, sewing it on, taking it off, sewing it on, taking it off because there was so much stunt work, it would come off too easily and we didn’t want that. It was such a huge sequence. I was so tired, but so satisfied by the end of filming that episode.

Not that I wasn’t focusing on what was going on, but it was so interesting to see the two of you turn and have this very emotional scene, and then just right off camera, you have the stunt walkers grabbing at you the entire time. How, as an actor, do you keep focused on the emotion and focused on the other actor, while all that is going on, presumably less than five feet away from you.

Preparation. I spent hours. Hours. Hours, and hours at home every night after I got home from filming that sequence, because that was a multiple day filming. Hours, making sure I’m tracking and on the phone with Ian Goldberg, going, “Okay.” But just tracking each moment because both characters have such different agendas. Dorie wants to keep her in the Tower for his legacy, and change Strand. I want to get her out because Morgan’s waiting and we have a plan and I have a whole organized situation going with Grace, and things are in place. Dorie has set up this whole hiding the walkies, and he has a whole agenda in place. And it’s this war of agendas, even though we both want the same thing, which is to make a safer haven.

The two characters, it’s not like on the nose discussions about these agendas, there’s greater concepts at play as well. So for me, making sure I know exactly every one of those beats for both of us, so that then when we get in to the minutia of the stunt coordination, camera work, physical prop management, I’m not also trying to remember where we’re at in the scene. It’s easy for me to put myself back into what my intention is, how I need to watch for him. Is he doing what I want him to do? He’s not doing what I want him to do. Wait, I got to get him out to do what I want him to do, but also manage all the stunts. So yeah, the prep.

You touched on this a little bit, but June’s so focused on getting Baby Mo out this entire episode. Beyond helping Morgan, beyond being just a symbol of hope and resistance against Strand… Why is this so important to her, in particular?

Baby Mo means to so many themes and concepts for her; about survival, about future, about hope, about children… She lost her daughter. Now Charlie, John Dorie. And she’s been wanting, ever since she lost the FEMA shelter and felt responsible for that with her daughter, I think she’s been trying to set up and make amends in the world to have a safe place for people, and to have future. And so to me, it’s a really heavy conviction and also, her connection to Morgan is an important one for her. And that connects her to John Dorie. It connects her also, just to future in general, Morgan stepped in front of her when Alicia pulled the gun on her in Season 4. Morgan means a lot to June, and that child means a lot to June, for June’s own heart and soul of, why keep going in this world?

Strand has been such a compelling villain this season, and he really steps it up this episode in particular, just in terms of number of bodies. What has it been like working with Colman Domingo in this new mode of bad guy Strand?

Well, he’s just flourishing in this character. It’s like this season is right up his alley of artistic joy, because what a fun turn for him. There was a lot that he contributed to Strand becoming this. That was something very important to Colman. He really worked hard to have this manifest this way for him. To be in these scenes with him, you can feel when an actor is hooked into something that they are doing, and Colman is just super hooked to this journey, this chapter of Strand. And it’s really fun to watch.

In terms of the emotional journey that June is going to go on in the last couple of episodes, what, if anything, can you tell me about that?

We’ve seen her broken, and I think we’re going to see her strong. She is one of these people that, once recovering from, every loss and every hardship, she’s now not becoming more broken… She’s pulling herself up by her boot straps with bigger muscles and that really, I’m enjoying, because you have two choices. You either break or you get stronger because you have to. There isn’t a choice in the matter, there is no choice. We’re going to see June come into her own ownership, of her own integrity of what needs to be and not… I just think there’s a strength that’s going to come from her that I’m enjoying.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC, and streams a week early on AMC+.