'The Walking Dead' Star Sarah Wayne Callies Slams AMC For Firing Frank Darabont: 'You Can't Beat His Writing'

As AMC's "The Walking Dead" universe continues to expand at a rapid pace, Frank Darabont's impact is still being felt. The 'Shawshank Redemption' director developed the hit zombie series in 2010, but was fired in 2011 due to budget disagreements with AMC. The show did very well without him, continuing to dominate the cable ratings for years and launching several spinoffs on AMC. A new limited series featuring original stars Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira was recently announced, injecting more excitement into the long-running franchise.

But some stars of the show are still bitter about Darabont's firing. One of those stars is Sarah Wayne Callies, who played Lori Grimes in the first three seasons of "The Walking Dead." Although she didn't last much longer on the show than Darabont, the actress still thinks her former boss was treated unfairly by the cable network.

In a new Real Ones podcast by Jon Bernthal (), Callies criticized AMC's decision to part ways with the former showrunner. She said the reasons given by the network for firing Darabont were inconsistent with the positive experiences she had had working with him.

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“For me, it was like an assassination,” Callies said. "The reasons we've been given are that he has no experience as a showrunner, he's unprepared, and he doesn't know what he's doing. But this motherfucker, a months before filming for Season 2 began, dropped six completed scripts in my lap and said, 'You can learn these lines. They're not going to change.' And they were wonderful.”

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In addition to Darabont's professionalism, Callies believes he had a much stronger creative vision for the series than any of the writers who replaced him. If successful, the three-time Oscar nominee would still be running things.

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