The Walking Dead Spoilers: Michael Cudlitz Explains Abraham’s Horrifying Backstory In The Comics, & How Show Treated What Happened

Spoilers

In last night’s episode of The Walking Dead, audiences got to see Abraham’s disturbing story and why his family chose to leave him. The thing is, the show left out graphic details of why Abraham killed the unknown assailant with a soup can and in a recent interview with TVLine, Michael Cudlitz explain why the scene played the way that it did.

“He has basically become what he is protecting them from,” Cudlitz said. “That horrifies his family. They don’t know who to be more afraid of, and because of that they wind up leaving. And all he’s trying to do is protect his family from, unfortunately, the group. The way it plays out in the comic is that this is actually the group that he has been traveling with. He goes out on a scavenger mission, comes back, and finds out that members of the group have raped his wife and his daughter, and made his son watch. And then he basically has a dismantling party on those members of the group. What happens is his wife basically says, “You have become worse than them.” And she leaves. And he can’t find them. He finally does find them, comes across them, and they’ve all been killed by walkers. In the comics — which I don’t think was necessary to do and I’m glad we chose to tell it the way we did, because I think there’s more of an emotional punch when you see something visually and there is a line that can be crossed — in the comics, actually, his wife and his son had been eaten so badly that there is nothing left to come back, and his daughter did come back and he winds up having to shoot her in the face. And that’s in the Robert Kirkman graphic novel. I think we’ve successfully captured the emotion of what went down with his family, and then also what has spurred him into action from taking his own life, when he has nothing left to live for, which was a mission that was outside of himself, bigger than himself, bigger than his family, and this is sort of his way to redeem himself for something that he thinks he’s caused, which was the death of his family.”

To read the rest of the interview, visit EW.com