Warning: This interview contains storyline and character spoilers for the “Remember” episode of The Walking Dead.

Rick lost his beard and became a cop again. We entered the world behind the gates of Alexandria. And we were introduced to a new and more fiercely determined Rick, who has declared his group will make every effort to get along with the Alexandrians, but if the Alexandrians won’t try just as hard… Rick and company will simply overtake them.

“Remember” director Greg Nicotero talks to Yahoo TV about helping Andrew Lincoln see his face for the first time in four seasons, how significant the beard loss really is to Rick, the killer line ad-libbed by Norman Reedus, what’s up with that missing gun, new cast member Tovah Feldshuh, and why the season finale was expanded to 90 minutes.

So Andy Lincoln’s beard finally came off, and you told me you’re the one who shaved it.

OK, so Andy has not been clean-shaven for four seasons. Part of the intent of the scene, of course, was for Rick to shut off this feral nature of their existence, and to go back to being the cop. When we started shooting the scene, it had been so long since he had really seen his face that he was zeroed in, staring at the mirror. Andy doesn’t watch the show. He’s the kind of actor who doesn’t really want to watch his performance. In the past, when we have done prosthetics on him, like when he gets beat up by The Governor, his face is all cut up and scarred. He loved the transformative process of makeup because it made him more comfortable looking at himself in the mirror, because he liked that he was looking at somebody else. You know what I mean?

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In this instance, I was standing in the bathroom with him. We really wanted to get it in one take because we didn’t want to have to put fake beards and fake hair on. We had multiple cameras rolling, and he took the scissors and started cutting. Then he picked up the razor and started shaving. He was staring, literally staring, at himself in the mirror and watching his face change.

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It was a fascinating experience for me, because I saw him sort of fixated, wondering who this person in the mirror was that was looking back, so much so that at one point, when he picked up the razor and he started shaving, he hadn’t cut away enough of the hair, so he was basically just shaving into… I was worried he was going to start hacking his face up. So once we got the initial bit of the shaving done, we cut the cameras and we had to take his beard down a lot further for the end part, because we shot it as a montage. He was so fazed out that I picked up the razor and had to shave most of his face down to a certain point, because he was just kind of in the zone. There was a really funny picture of me in the bathroom shaving him, while he’s kind of just fixated on, Who is this person? Of course, I shot video of it on my phone, and sent the video to his wife in London. She was like, “Thank God that beard is gone.”

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