‘Fear The Walking Dead’: Danay Garcia On Nick’s Death, Frank Dillane’s Exit

“Fear the Walking Dead” star Danay Garcia admitted that Frank Dillane’s exit from the AMC series as well as his character’s death on the show was particularly difficult for her.

“It was really hard,” Garcia told Comicbook.com at Walker Stalker Con in Nashville, Tennessee of saying goodbye to Dillane and his character Nick. “I’ve been through three shocks: The day that I got the script [for Season 4, episode 3] and then I went through a denial. The day I shot it was my second shock. I was shocked and then the day I watched it was like, ‘Oh my god! I can’t do this anymore!’”

In an interview with AMC a couple of weeks ago, Garcia opened up about filming the episode, which saw the death of Nick in the hands of the youngest Vulture member, Charlie (Alexa Nisenson).

“It was something I kept telling myself wouldn’t happen,” said Garcia, who plays Dillane’s onscreen girlfriend Luciana. “You just don’t want to confront that day you’re going to shoot it. You just don’t want to deal with it. You act like everything is great.”

“Even on that day, I was like, ‘This is going to be an easy day!’” the 33-year-old actress continued. “I knew it was going to be a ride, I could feel my body getting ready for that. It was difficult going through it. I couldn’t think of Nick not being there anymore. It was back and forth emotions for us… It was a journey and I gave as much as I had to honor that loss and that story. It was something that moved me for days and not just me but the entire cast and crew.”

A day after Nick’s death scene aired, Dillane told The Hollywood Reporter that it was his personal choice to leave the zombie drama. “I had been doing the show for three or four years now,” Dillane said. “There had been much chopping and changing. I was very close to Nick. I played him for a very long time. But it felt like it was time to move on and try different things, and play new characters.”

“Television is a very difficult medium for an actor because you have to work so much,” continued the 27-year-old British actor. “I also get quite homesick; I miss Europe very much when I’m away. It [also] felt like an end of an era, with [new showrunners] Ian [Goldberg] and Andrew [Chambliss] coming in. They are great writers; really, really fantastic. And now that Lennie [James] is crossing over into ‘Fear the Walking Dead,’ it felt like the right time for me to move on.”

“Fear the Walking Dead” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. EDT on AMC.