The Walking Dead is an AMC television adaptation from showrunner Angela Kang pulled from the pages of the hit Image comic series by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard. The series stars Norman Reedus, Danai Gurira, Khary Paton, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Melissa McBride. Season nine returns February 10, 2019.
With the first half of The Walking Dead season 9 wrapped up, we now have a brand new trailer that finally reveals Alpha and Beta — aka the top two Whisperers and brand new villains of the series. The reveal of the new foes came during an insanely great mid-season finale which saw the SHOCKING death of yet another fan favourite character (and one that is yet again – still alive in the comic series). I won’t spoil who died, but I will say that they went out like a true badass in one of the series’ most epic outros to date.
I’ve been chomping at the bit to catch a glimpse of Beta myself because I’m a huge fan of actor Ryan Hurst, who we all know and love from his Sons of Anarchy days, but my god does he look vicious and iconic as the towering second-in-command – Beta. In the comics, Beta doesn’t have a beard, but he does have that dead-skin mask and longer hair, complete with not one but two machetes because why not make him even more terrifying? In the short teaser below, we even see him going toe to toe with Daryl Dixon, so expect some amazing scenes with Hurst as the big bad Beta when the show returns in February.
Although we don’t see her face, we do catch a glimpse of the bald Alpha navigating a crowd of her Whisperers as she looks to be descending upon The Hilltop or Kingdom in broad daylight with her army of zombie skin wearing psychopaths. Although we don’t see actress Samantha Morton’s face, I’m very much looking forward to seeing how her interactions with the survivors are going to play out, especially with that inevitable make-shift territory marker reveal which will no doubt stun fans with one of the biggest and most horrifying displays of violence in series history. There will be more death people and I’ll be there to watch it unfold as the Whisperers cause mayhem in 2019.