The Walking Dead: Scott Gimple confirms Beta’s ‘Fear’ cameo
Scott Gimple, chief content officer and executive producer on The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, confirms that Ryan Hurst’s Beta had a cameo in Fear.
“I can’t tell you too much about that,” Hurst previously told EW of Beta’s secret identity. “We’ve been dropping Easter eggs here and there, maybe on this show, maybe on another show that’s connected to it, but I’ll sort of keep dangling that carrot and let people wait for the end of this season to see what happens.”
Hurst’s unmasked face was seen on the cover of a country music album in the Season 5 Episode 14, “Today and Tomorrow.” The cameo comes when Rubén Blades’s vinyl record collection spills on the ground.
If that isn’t enough to confirm Beta’s backstory, another Easter egg could be found on TWD in Season 10 Episode 5, “What It Always Is,” when Nadia Hilker’s Magna is listening to a song. The song is The Turtle and the Monkey by Emily Kinney (Beth in seasons 2-5) although the singer sounds very much like Hurst.
Hurst himself even hinted that Beta was a celebrity pre-apocalypse.
“All I can say at this point is maybe Beta was a large personality in the world before the apocalypse, and that sort of letting go of that might have been tragic to his psyche,” Hurst said on The Talking Dead.
“[The three Walking Dead shows] do share a universe, so where there are opportunities, we want to take them. Even with that album cover [with Hurst’s Beta appearing on Fear], it was so funny,” said Gimple. “I mean just by virtue of the fact that there was a scene with all these records in it, and we knew this shared aspect, we didn’t even want to make that big a deal of it. We just wanted it to exist in there so that people might, deep cut-wise, we were hoping one or two people might notice into the future.”
He continued, “We didn’t want to make as big a deal about it. It’s just nice, even unto ourselves, between the shows to feel that it’s one world. That said, unlike reality today, these worlds are so isolated from each other because of a lack of mass communications, mass transportation. In some ways, they are on little islands from each other, so when they can have those crosses, it’s kind of wonderful.”
We expect to see more of Beta’s history in the second half of Season 10.
The Walking Dead Season 10 returns with new episodes Feb. 23 on AMC.
Sources: EW, Talking Dead
When Beth “grows up” she wants to see her creations appear on the screen and stage. In her free time, Beth blogs about her love of craft beer and writes screenplays. She received her bachelors in journalism from Youngstown State and received her masters in communication from The University of Akron. She is honored to be a part of the FanFest family.
