By Ed Diokno
SPOILER ALERT! ‘Walking Dead’ fans who don’t want to know what MIGHT happen in the next few episodes should stop reading now!
GOOD NEWS: Steven Yeun has signed on to star in the motion picture Mayhem.
BAD NEWS: Does this mean he has more time because his character Glenn Rhee might have been killed on in The Walking Dead?
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Yeun will be the male lead in Mayhem opposite Australian actress Samara Weaving.
Mayhem is scheduled to begin filming in Serbia later this month and will likely be released in some form in 2017.
There has been wide speculation that it would be Glenn, apparently the only Asian American survivor in the zombie apocalypse. Some say that the producers are making Glenn’s supposed fate too obvious.
Fans point out that the show always does an episode fleshing out a character prior to their ultimate death. That’s bad news for Carol, the abuse victim turned badass survivor to someone unwilling to kill anymore.
RELATED: The rest of The Walking Dead’s episodes are going to be brutal
But, don’t forget Maggie, Glenn’s wife, who in a previous episode told Glenn, “I can’t do this anymore,” after killing her captors.
The totally unexpected death of Dr. Denise, excellently portrayed by actress Meredith Wever, has thrown comic book followers off-balance. She was shot through the eye with a crossbow arrow, the same death that was supposed to befall red-head Abraham. But he still lives.
The fact that Abraham is still alive demonstrates that the show runners are not afraid to go off-script, which might be good news for Glenn fans, but that also puts the fate of other characters up in the air.
Yen’s casting in Mayhem will present a rare situation in Hollywood. He’ll be that rare creature – an Asian American leading man in a U.S.-made motion picture. Let’s hope its a harbinger of things to come.
Yeun will play Derek Sanders (don’t be surprised if the character’s name gets changed to reflect Yeun’s Korean American heritage). Sanders gets fired and on the same day, a virus breaks out that allows people to act out their wildest impulses. He is trapped in a quarantined building and has to fight for his job, fight for survival and escape. Pretty bad day at the office, I’d say. Think Die Hard meets Walking Dead. Right up Yeun’s alley.
It will be Yeun’s biggest role to date outside of Walking Dead and could be a breakout role commercially for the actor, who is being primed as an everyman’s action-hero – a role he’s had plenty of experience playing.
(Ed Diokno writes a blog :Views From The Edge: news and analysis from an Asian American perspective.)
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