On Location

You Can Live in Alexandria

The sleepy town where the series films is an actual Georgia development. Its residents try to carry on as normal despite the influx of zombies. Call it the cost of living—with the undead. —DALTON ROSS

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH Rick and Carl eyeball their new home with Aaron (Ross Marquand).

YES, PEOPLE ACTUALLY LIVE HERE. During the filming of the big fight scene between Rick and Pete near the end of season 5, the take was momentarily halted while a mail truck drove through to deliver catalogs and bills to residents of the community.

Fictional Alexandria is also literally right on the other side of the train tracks from another iconic Walking Dead setting: Woodbury. That’s right, you can see one town from the other. In fact, while filming in Alexandria, Walking Dead cast members would often walk over to Woodbury for a coffee pick-me-up.

The Gin Property development was built by Scott Tigchelaar, the president of Raleigh Studios Atlanta, the home base for The Walking Dead in Senoia. (The famous prison from seasons 3 and 4 was built onto the back of Raleigh.) And as Walking Dead exec producer Gale Anne Hurd explains, Gin Property was specifically built to also be used as a live set.

“Luckily the community was developed by the same people who own the studios,” Hurd tells EW. “Part of the covenant in the CC&Rs of that community is that it is designed to be a haven and a draw for filming, so that’s something that all the residents there were aware of—[though initially they] may have forgotten. But I have a feeling the blasting lights at 3 in the morning probably reminded them.”

CC&Rs stands for Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions, which basically are rules placed on homes by—in this case—a developer. So if you want to buy a house and live there, you agree to the conditions. And now one of those conditions has become a giant 15-ft. wall around the majority of the property to simulate the wall keeping the zombies away from Alexandria. According to the Newnan Times-Herald, the studio had even obtained a permit for the wall. That’s a lot of wall. Alexandria remains an active community in the comic books, so they could be there for a while.

Kathleen Sullivan, who lives on Plyant Street in the community, did not sound particularly enthused about the enclosure when she spoke to the Times-Herald. “I said that the wall would be ugly. None of us had seen it yet. But OMG, it is uglier than I could ever imagine.”

While residents have to worry about a big wall surrounding their houses for a while longer, the show has to worry about spoilers from nosy neighbors who may want to leak details of what they see or sneakily take unauthorized images. However, Hurd says that’s actually less of an issue than when they film in other locations. “The truth is, we face it wherever we go when we’re outside the studio property,” says Hurd. “At least there isn’t a home that is six stories high where they can actually get a lens focused on us. The area that we film in primarily, the houses are empty. The people have decided while we’re there to live elsewhere—or they understand and respect the rules.”

In the end it sounds like the local homeowners and The Walking Dead’s crew have learned to coexist and deal with the inconveniences on both sides. “I think the biggest issue is really access,” Hurd says. “People want to be able to get home when they drive up, and that isn’t always the case because we’re in the middle of a shot. But we try to be respectful to that part of the neighborhood and understand that these are people’s lives. We’re there, they’re there.”

That integration has led to a few awkward moments. “We’re shooting scenes in this [supposedly deserted] town and you see the curtains move in somebody’s window, and there are people living in there!” says cast member Melissa McBride. “And you look over and they wave, and then the mail truck comes through.”

A map of the real location of Senoia, geographically much closer to Terminus than Virginia

The literal writing on the wall

And the gutted interior of a Gin Properties facade.