Not many people know about the huge overlap between the cast of The Walking Dead and The Mist cast (the movie, not the Netflix show). Multiple cast members from the 2007 Stephen King adaptation The Mist went on to appear on the hit AMC zombie series The Walking Dead, and here's why. To be sure, The Walking Dead, adapted from Robert Kirkman's comic books, and The Mist, adapted from Stephen King's novella in the Skeleton Crew collection, share other similarities outside the cast list. Here's how the cast of The Walking Dead draws from The Mist cast, and what other influences the Zombie show takes from the '00s Stephen King adaptation.
The Mist and The Walking Dead are both based on apocalyptic fiction event that changes the world, but the Armageddon scenarios are very different. For example, as the zombie-free The Mist's hotly contested ending revealed, King's cosmic horror apocalypse might not be the end of the world. Both The Walking Dead and The Mist also focus on a group of survivors who do their best to survive the nightmarish, existential threat that now exists, those being zombies and interdimensional Lovecraftian monsters, respectively. Both also feature unstable or immoral human characters who pose almost as much of a threat as any supernatural beast. Even further, both The Walking Dead and The Mist had noir cuts — black and white versions intended to evoke the feel of horror films of the past.
Still, the most striking commonality between The Walking Dead TV show and The Mist movie is the amount of onscreen personnel crossover between them. It turns out that there's a good explanation for that. Here's the how and why the cast of Walking Dead contains so many faces from The Mist cast, as well as other ways the completely unrelated movie and TV show, made three years apart, are uncannily similar.
Why The Walking Dead & The Mist Share So Many Cast Members
The most noticeable common member of the cast of Walking Dead to show up in The Mist cast is Laurie Holden. Holden played Andrea on Walking Dead and female lead Amanda Dunfrey in The Mist. After her, there's Melissa McBride, who's become a small screen superstar playing Carol on Walking Dead but was a virtual unknown when she appeared in a small but captivating role in The Mist, as a mother who leaves the relative safety of the supermarket to go find her kids and somehow survives the film. Then there's Jeffrey DeMunn, who played Dale on Walking Dead and the terrified Dan Miller in The Mist, or Juan Gabriel Pareja, Morales on The Walking Dead and, curiously enough, a character also named Morales in The Mist. That's not even everyone either, as several bit players are also shared between the two projects, as well as behind-the-scenes crew members.
That's a lot of crossover, and the reason for it is simple: Frank Darabont. Darabont directed The Mist and served as The Walking Dead's initial showrunner. Darabont has a habit of "collecting" actors as his career progresses, regularly working with the same people. In the case of The Walking Dead, it was Darabont's first project after The Mist, and so he opted to import several members of the latter's cast into the former's ensemble. In fact, Darabont originally wanted Mist lead Thomas Jane to play Rick Grimes, but it didn't work out.
Other Weird Ways The Mist And TWD Are Similar
The Mist and The Walking Dead share several cast members and director Frank Darabont, and the two appear back-to-back in his career history, but that's not all. Producer Denise M. Huth only has three credited projects, and two of them are The Mist and The Walking Dead. The third is the 2001 movie The Majestic, for which Jim Carrey turned down Phone Booth, but Huth wasn't a producer on it. Darabont also directed The Majestic, so it seems that, like actors, he also likes to carry production staff between projects. It's not only on the production side that The Mist and The Walking Dead are similar though. There are also many common but surprisingly acute story beats they share.
General apocalyptic horror genre parallels aside, one of the human antagonists of The Mist shares a lot of traits with Alpha, the leader of the Whisperers and the main threat in several Walking Dead seasons. In The Mist, Mrs. Carmody (played by Marcia Gay Harden) responds to the end-times befalling the town of Bridgton, Maine, by leaning into fanatical religious beliefs. She gathers a flock of followers, and, by the end of the movie, they're willing to kill and die for Mrs. Carmody and her outrageous reactionary religious beliefs (all forged in response to the cosmic Armageddon). Aside from aesthetic and situational differences, this is exactly how Alpha (Samantha Morton) forms her zombie-worshipping cult of Whisperers. Strong female antagonists with a quasi-religious schtick aren't the only thematic similarity either. The fate of children during the apocalypse is a key arc in multiple The Walking Dead seasons and is also the reason the ending of The Mist is so harrowing and resonates with audiences over a decade after release. The idea that humans are the real threat in any fantasy Armageddon, be it zombies or Lovecraftian monsters, is a central plot point of both.
Finally, although this one's a little more obvious, both are based on works of literature but have made heavy alterations to the source material. The differences between The Walking Dead comic and TV show differences are well known to fans, but viewers of The Mist might not realize just how much was added to the movie. King's original novella left much to the imagination, but Darabont's 2007 adaptation removed this ambiguity. Most notably, the infamous ending of The Mist was created for the film. In the Stephen King book, Drayton and his son drive into the titular Mist with their fate left unrevealed. They're also both adaptations that tick one of the most important boxes — the original authors are fans of the changes. Robert Kirkman, author of The Walking Dead, and Stephen King have both said they approve of the alterations to their respective projects. The ending of The Mist in particular was greatly appreciated by Stephen King, who hated movie adaptations of his work, by and large. Sadly, both director Frank Darabont and Robert Kirkman would go on to sue AMC over The Walking Dead, but when Darabont initially approached Kirkman about an adaptation, it's likely the former's success bringing The Mist to screens factored into the latter saying yes.