‘The Walking Dead’ Star Sarah Wayne Callies Calls AMC’s Frank Darabont Firing “An Assassination”

While AMC continues to expand The Walking Dead universe, which began under showrunner Frank Darabont, some of the show’s stars still haven’t come to terms with his firing.

Darabont developed the hit zombie series in 2010, but was fired in 2011 due to budgetary disagreements with AMC. Sarah Wayne Callies, who played Lori Grimes on the first three seasons of The Walking Dead, recently expressed her disapproval of how Darabont’s exit from the show was handled by the network.

Appearing on Jon Bernthal’s Real Ones podcast, Callies criticized AMC’s decision to part ways with the former showrunner. She claimed the reasons the network gave for firing Darabont didn’t seem to match her experiences with working with him.

��To me, it just felt like an assassination,” said Callies. “The reasons that we were given were that he’s unexperienced as a showrunner, and he’s unprepared, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But this motherfucker, one month before we started shooting Season 2, dropped six completed scripts in my lap and said, ‘You can learn these lines. They’re not going to change.’ And they were wonderful.”

Callies also feels that Darabont’s creative vision for the show would have far surpassed that of any of the writers who replaced him.

“This might be a controversial thing to say… you cannot beat his writing,” she said. “You can’t. And there are some really good people who’ve been writing on that show since, and I got a lot of love and respect for them. Nobody writes like Frank Darabont. That’s a whole different level.”

Stream The Walking Dead on AMC+