‘Fear The Walking Dead’: Jenna Elfman On Filming At Abandoned Water Park

“Fear the Walking Dead” star Jenna Elfman admitted that filming her scenes at the abandoned water park in Season 4, episode 4 of the AMC series was a real challenge for her.

Elfman, who plays Naomi on the zombie drama, said that she had a great time working with Alycia Debnam-Carey while filming the episode, but the weather at that time was just too cold.

“Alycia’s super fun to work with,” Elfman told Comicbook.com of Debnam-Carey, who plays Alicia on the show. “[But] it was really cold. Walking through the water on that first walker kill scene and then climbing the slide and we’re all wet. Once you walk through the water, now you’re wet, and the wardrobe department has to keep spraying you down and keeping you wet. It was like 30 degrees outside. It was an exceptionally cold season, too. We were outside sixteen hours a day just [shivering].”

And that’s why Elfman has high regard for the stuntmen who played walkers in the water park scenes. “Those stunt people were in that water freezing for hours,” Elfman said. “I thought it was heated up for them. It apparently was warm for just the first hour and then, after that, it was not. They were such pros. They weren’t complaining. We were taking bottles like this, filling it up with water, and then handing it to them and they were holding it to warm up their hands!”

As to how they came up with the abandoned water park as one of the settings of the installment, co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss told Entertainment Weekly: “One of the things we’ve embraced in going to Texas is just really using what is on offer there. The water park is actually something that we drove by when we were scouting the stadium. So it actually is a water park that’s just like a mile from the baseball stadium. And that’s where we got the idea for a water park.”

Though filming at that particular water park wasn’t feasible, Chambliss said that they ended up finding a water park that actually was abandoned. “[It] had been built, I think, in the ‘70s,” Chambliss said of the water park. “It was already in disrepair, so that made our production team a lot happier. They still did a fantastic job dressing it, but a little bit of the work was done for them.”

While last week’s episode already revealed how Naomi and John (Garret Dillahunt) met, Elfman promised that “a lot more is coming” for her character. For instance, in this Sunday’s episode, Naomi let Madison (Kim Dickens) accompany her to her former camp.

“Fear the Walking Dead” Season 4, episode 6, titled “Just In Case,” airs on Sunday, May 20 at 9 p.m. EDT on AMC.