The Walking Dead Is Using Body Doubles to Fool Spoiler-Seekers

Fans of The Walking Dead are dedicated to digging up spoilers of what's coming up on the show. There are websites devoted to stalking the show's set that are constantly reporting on the goings-on during production. They're like detectives, it's insane. But they're finally meeting some resistance.

The Walking Dead as a production matches this insanity on the same level, taking extreme measures to protect its story from fans' prying eyes. And The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman just revealed even more about what the production is doing to throw people off the scent.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kirkman said that the production has "employed body doubles in places to make people think that people are in places that they're not." So that photo from the set you saw of Daryl riding his motorcycle or whatever? Might not be real. It might have been some random dude in a Norman Reedus wig.

Kirkman also confirms that The Walking Dead is not sending advance screeners of the premiere to journalists in an effort to keep spoilers from leaking. He says they're taking "extra security measures on distribution and the international dubbing and those things to help prevent the kind of leaks that we've had in the past." And he says they're engaging in the sinister-sounding practice of "monitoring actor movement." He doesn't explain exactly what this is, but it sounds like trailing actors when they're not working to make sure they're not giving anything away.

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"It's pretty exciting to try and hide certain things," he says. "This is a big season, so we're not just protecting things that happen in the first episode; there are things that happen in the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth episode and beyond."

It sounds like if someone from inside the production were to leak spoilers they'd have to go into witness protection if they don't want a crack on the head from a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.

The secrecy will finally let up a bit once The Walking Dead Season 7 premieres on Sunday, Oct. 23 at 9/8c on AMC.