It’s a big month for the many fans of AMC’s THE WALKING DEAD, as the second season gears up for its October 16 premiere (with a knockout 90-minute episode, to be fully reviewed here soon), and the first reissued today in new, bonus-packed special-edition DVD and Blu-ray sets by Anchor Bay Entertainment. To mark the latter occasion, we spoke to two of the most noteworthy ghouls from the premiere episode “Days Gone Bye”: Addy Miller (the little-girl zombie) and Keisha Tillis (Morgan Jones’ undead wife).

Fango caught up with both actresses at New Jersey’s Monster-Mania convention earlier this year. Miller made quite an impression in the opening scene of THE WALKING DEAD’s initial episode, and while she says she’s honored to have been the show’s very first zombie, she reveals that she didn’t initially have that place of prominence. “Originally, that scene wasn’t gonna be the first one you see,” she tells us, “but [creator/director] Frank Darabont moved it to the beginning, so I have to thank him for that. He was so nice. Every time you do a scene and he loves it, he’ll get up and dance or jump off a chair. It’s so funny.” Still, she adds, Darabont took the job of directing zombies seriously. “There was one take where I turned around, and I blinked. He was like, ‘No, no, no. No blinking allowed.’ I said, “OK…” and I turned around without blinking the second time, and he was like, ‘Yes, yes!’ and was jumping around again!”

No doubt it was hard to stay a calm, composed zombie with such an energetic director, and Miller confirms, “Sometimes it was, yeah. If I didn’t have all that makeup on, I’d be smiling and laughing.” Getting into the ghoul garb, she adds, “took about two and a half hours with two people working on me. There was a lot of preparation; they did a face mold fitting, they had to measure my eyes. It took a lot of work.”

The 11-year-old actress, who previously appeared in the low-budget thriller PARANORMAL, will soon be seen in a very different kind of walking-dead opus: PLAN 9, John Johnson’s remake of the notorious Edward D. Wood Jr. Z-flick. “I play Sarah, who is Conrad Brooks’ granddaughter. Conrad is from the original PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE; he was one of the police officers in that, but we’re both psychics in this one. It was a really fun movie to do.” And yes, Miller did watch Wood’s so-bad-it’s-good classic before shooting her role. “I watched it on the way there. I didn’t really like it very much,” she laughs.

Playing the zombified spouse of survivor Morgan (Lennie James) in the same episode, Tillis has similar memories of Darabont. “He’s a very, very emotional director,” she says. “Very excited—he lets you know how he feels, and that’s a good thing. He’d say, ‘Oh, excellent! Excellent! We’ve gotta bring you back, show how you got killed!’ ” While such a return may or may not transpire, she adds that it was “a blessing” to work with Darabont. “It was my first time really working with such a great director, and I consider myself very fortunate.”

When it came to enacting her specific ghoul, Tillis notes, “All I was given was instructions, and not how to act like a zombie—just basically that the house I was in was familiar. That was all I was told, and the rest I had to create. I did not go to [the production’s] ‘zombie school’; I heard it was so much fun, but I didn’t get the chance. And when I walked on that set, the other zombies around me, my co-workers, were so intense. All those people when to ‘zombie school,’ and when I tell you they were on point, they were on point. It gave me the motivation to take it up another level.”

Like Miller, Tillis recalls spending a good deal of time in the makeup chair for her transformation, and says, “It was great. I felt like I was being pampered for two and a half hours!” There was a bit of discomfort involved, “but not necessarily the prosthetics. It was the contact lenses that bothered me the most, so every now and then the lady would make her rounds with the juice [laughs]. She catered my eyes.”

THE WALKING DEAD marked Tillis’ maiden voyage into genre territory, and she says, “I never was really into horror, but I was just in a [National Geographic Channel] documentary called LOCKED UP ABROAD. I went to the Phillipines to shoot it, and that was real-life horror [laughs]!”

The new DVD and Blu-ray sets of THE WALKING DEAD’s first season are jam-packed with fresh featurettes and other extras; click here for the full details.

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