‘Fear the Walking Dead’: Alexa Nisenson Talks What’s Next for Charlie

Is that it for Charlie (Alexa Nisenson) on Fear the Walking Dead? Spoilers for this week’s episode, “Mourning Cloak”, but by the end of the hour the teen has been diagnosed with a fatal amount of radiation poisoning, after a betrayal by the first boy she ever kissed (Ali, played by Ashton Arbab). But just because Charlie is down, don’t count her out.

“Well we should say, as Madison [Clark] proves, no one’s gone until they’re gone,” co-showrunner Ian Goldberg told Decider. “But by the end of the episode things do not look good for Charlie.”

Goldberg is referencing Kim Dickens’ Madison Clark, who will return later this season despite seemingly dying in Season 4. Still, other than some potential last second twist, Charlie has a ticking clock eating away at her, something that doubles down on the show’s idea that nobody is safe.

“As smart as everyone has been, as many effective ways there are to protect yourself living in an environment like this, there are instances where you just can’t protect yourself from everything,” Goldberg continued. “On the Charlie side of it we’d been interested in telling a story with her that was all about kind of the life that she never got to live. Because when we first saw her on the show she was a 10 year old girl who had already been living in the apocalypse for as long as she could remember it. She spent most of her life in the apocalypse by this point. So we wanted to tell a story about getting a very brief glimmer at what her life could have been like before. And getting a taste of that. There was something that felt very bittersweet about having that taste of innocent love come with a cost.”

Though co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss teased that, “exactly how Charlie’s radiation poisoning will play out, we’ll just have to let people watch and see,” for Nisenson, the episode was an incredible challenge to tackle.

“Charlie went on a season’s length journey just in the span of one episode,” Nisenson said. “Which is incredibly rewarding as an actor because I just got to do so much in just a short period of time.”

Nisenson was also cagey about how the radiation will impact Charlie (“we will see how Charlie continues to move forward with this. How it affects her mentally, physically, and where it leaves her in the story.”), but she did find the central love story between Ali, the new kid at Strand’s (Colman Domingo) Tower stronghold, and Charlie, to be “beautiful” and “heartbreaking.”

“Getting to play all those different sides of Charlie was wonderful and seeing that whole evolution from just start to finish of the episode,” Nisenson continued. “And where it will continue throughout the rest of the season, we will definitely continue to see where it takes her emotionally and physically.”

The episode wasn’t all gloom and doom, though. Directed by long-time cast-member Lennie James, “Mourning Cloak” also included a sequence where Charlie and her new beau bowled together in an abandoned bowling alley, surrounded by the undead.

“It’s such a fun, sweet, pivotal moment for the characters,” Nisenson said. “But for me personally, we never get to film in places like that so being there was just incredible… We rarely see anything normal, or anything like that… For Charlie, she’s never really been in an environment like that. And obviously part of the scene is she’s never bowled before, so we get to kinda have fun with that a little bit. I think for me, the character, for everyone we all just had a great time with it.”

Beyond Charlie’s dramatic highs and lows, though, there’s an undercurrent of danger in the episode — or specifically, a lack of real danger. While Howard (Omid Abtahi) is barely holding down the fort, with everything going on with Charlie, Strand is off somewhere doing… Something. When asked whether fans should be worried about Strand’s plans, actor Colman Domingo quipped, “very, he says with an evil laugh.”

There’s also the matter of what Strand will do once he gets back to the Tower and discovers that Howard let a radiation-poisoned Charlie into the building, let a new recruit die on the job, and generally made a big mess of things. While Abtahi noted that Howard’s reasons will become clearer later in the season, first he’s going to have to deal with the wrath of Strand.

“I think he’s gonna be pissed,” Domingo said on Strand’s eventual return. “He trusts so few people, and we already saw in 7a how it’s very tricky with Strand. He does have very hard lines. You never know how he’s going to respond, but I think it’s not going to be well.”

What that means for Charlie, and the rest of the Tower? Stay tuned.

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