‘The Walking Dead’ Alum Samantha Morton Talks Alpha Character Being Killed off Show (Exclusive)

Samantha Morton made a huge impact on the AMC series The Walking Dead as he played the dangerous villain Alpha. She was on the show for two seasons (19 episodes) before her character was killed by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Two years after her last appearance on The Walking Dead, Morton made her return to the franchise to reprise her character in the anthology series Tales of the Walking Dead. In an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com, Morton shared her thoughts on returning and how things ended with Alpha on The Walking Dead. 

“I was so excited. I was really devastated when Alpha’s character was cut short,” Morton exclusively told PopCulture. “From the conversations I’d had with [The Waking Dead showrunner Angela Kang] when I was hired for the role, originally, I was booked for four seasons. And then, my character exited after just the second season for me because, obviously, Andrew Lincoln had left the show and so I think they needed to compress all of The Walking Dead comic books down so I exited quite early. I was really sad because I felt, I don’t know, I’d just gotten my teeth into this character. And so, when the fans responded to her and there was an interest in that storyline, so much so that they wrote this episode called Dee about who Alpha was before, I was over the moon. I was so excited and I couldn’t wait to jump on a plane and kind of get back into character.”

In Tales of the Walking Dead, Morton plays Dee, who is a woman looking to take care of her child who is named Lydia. The two are on a riverboat with a group trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. Dee and Lydia escape the boat after a rival group attempt to hijack it, and that is where they run into the Whisperers, a group Dee would eventually be the leader of and be called Alpha. 

“She’s highly suspicious of anybody that’s out to harm her or Lydia,” Morton said when talking about Dee. “That’s something that is a thread that Alpha has. She protects the Whisperers. She protects Beta. She protects her own. I find that, in the show, Alpha is the villain. But if you were to film the show again and you had a different protagonist, you would see that the Whisperers, they were attacked first. We were defending, and then it became a war but, ultimately, we were on the defense, not the offense.” The season finale of Tales of the Walking Dead airs on Sunday (Sept. 18) at 9 p.m. ET on AMC and is available now on AMC+. The Walking Dead is in its final season, and the last eight episodes will begin airing on Oct. 2.