Seth Gilliam, best known for his role as the eventually upstanding Ellis Carver of HBO’s The Wire, has joined the cast of The Walking Dead’s fifth season, according to Deadline. Unlike some previous Walking Dead casting announcements, attempts to match Gilliam’s role with his comic book analogue are proving futile: His character bears the name “Michael Todd,” though Deadline notes that this is just some sort of alias for the casting breakdown. (Even though the addition of Michael Todd to The Walking Dead world could do wonders for zombie skin. He’s also not the guy from Coheed And Cambria, since the survivors of the zombie apocalypse have suffered enough.)
What we do know is that his character is described as having “a friendly, puckish humor but also having a haunted side stemming from a dark secret” (which, in regard to that last part, may as well just say, “He is a character on The Walking Dead”). We also know that Gilliam joins Chad Coleman and Larry Gilliard Jr. as the third Wire alum to join The Walking Dead so far, suggesting the show may be building to the reveal that the staggering zombies are all just a grand metaphor for America’s drug addiction and the institutionalized decay of our bureaucracies.