ONTD

After spending Season 1 as an abused wife, and the second as a grieving mother, Carol has had a very different journey this time around in the AMC Sunday night series. She survived a prison section zombie attack, got up the courage to flirt with Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), and rather recently suggested Andrea give The Governor the best night of his life, before killing him as he slept (Andrea, regretfully couldn’t complete the mission).

If Hershel Greene (Scott Wilson) is the conscience of the show, Melissa’s Carol is the heart, and that’s probably one of the reasons plenty of fans are hoping to see her character in a proper romance with Daryl at some point in the series.

“I love the Caryl-ers,” Melissa told AccessHollywood.com, referring to the fans’ name for those dreaming of a Carol-Daryl romance. “I think they’re awesome.”

So, yes, we addressed Carol-Daryl as we chatted with the actress about the AMC drama, but first, Melissa shared with Access her thoughts on the potential war ahead between the prison gang and The Governor’s Woodbury people.

Melissa: She’s a warrior, she’s ready to really fight for her people. She loves her Team Prison (laughs). She loves them and she’s gonna fight. It’s the only thing she has left, you know? And she is going to fight to help save everybody. She’s gonna do what she has to do and it’s unfortunate that he called it war, but the world is so, so strange. It’s surreal to hear these things — ‘We’re going to war.’ When you’re little, you’d never think you’re going to hear these words in a conversation, you never think you’re going to be running around with a gun. Well, she didn’t (laughs). It’s just surreal to go through these changes and accept this is what the world has become and this is who I am becoming.

Melissa: Her mindset is adapting. This is really survival, it’s not like, ‘I can flee when he’s drunk and asleep and I can get out of here, I can go to a shelter.’ This is — there’s nowhere to go. It’s a whole different thing and she really is finding [out] what she’s made of because of this world that’s forcing her to really pull out all the stops and wake up all the sleeping parts of herself or the diminished parts of herself. They’ve got to come to the surface now and I think, as far as, going to war, I think she’s gonna do what she’s capable of doing and Rick may or may not dictate to her — you know, they don’t have a plan yet. So, they gotta figure this out. What is she good at (laughs)? He told her she was a pretty good shooter, sent her up to the tower. You saw what happened there (laughs).

Melissa: I love the Caryl-ers. I think they’re awesome and they’re so passionate and hard core and then you have the other group who’s like, ‘Argh! She’s too old for him. No, he needs somebody hot. He needs a bad a**.’ And I just love that little, ‘To ship or not to ship.’ I think it’s great. And all the fan art is lovely and fun and funny and I get a kick [out of it]. I go on Tumblr. I do.

Melissa: And I absolutely agree with her and I’m so glad that she said that because I think the same thing and I have thought the same thing… Like, look at it this way, they already are, just by virtue of wanting something like the kiss or whatever… But I think people don’t see it that way ‘til there’s a physical confirmation, if you will. But… they’re friends, they care for one another, they nurture one another, there’s an easement between these two, there’s this beautiful room that they give each other and then they call each other out of it they need to. And so, who knows? Who knows what happened or didn’t happen in those eight months that we didn’t see them. They could have already been there and went, ‘Nah, you know, let’s just be pals’ (laughs), or who knows?

Melissa: Yeah, I think so and I think a lot of her playfulness and teasing with Daryl is also a way for her to talk herself more into that path — not just with Daryl, but with herself as a woman, to feel that again about herself, to feel that, ‘I’m someone that’s desirable,’ because for so long she didn’t and whether that’s a conscious thing on her part — and I don’t think that it is — I think it’s just sort of that, again, that thing coming to the surface. She’ll throw those little things out there. It’s almost like when you already have an answer to something, but you keep talking about it to someone because you want to talk yourself into it. You know what I mean?

Melissa: Right and it’s probably — it’s very foreign at that point, coming out of her. Even the feeling that, to have gone through what I am thinking that she went through, what I have given her to have gone through would be — you’re almost asexual at some point. There’s no desire. It’s the last thing on your mind. And yet, she’s a woman and there is nothing like — especially in that world — there’s nothing like physical touch. There’s nothing like being hugged or held or just anything as simple as that.

Melissa: Oh gosh, yeah we made that song. The little song… Yeah, that was fun.

Melissa: If we survive Season 3 — if we ever get together again, we’ll have to revisit that because it’s fun to let our brains go there. We just have so much fun on the set. I hate to say, sometimes we’ll lampoon our own characters (laughs) and come up with these silly things and it’s a great way to work off, to step out of the intense moments. We just get giddy on the set sometimes.

Melissa: No (laughs).

Melissa: Speaking of craft services, here’s a funny little Norman story. There’s a bunch of bananas in a bowl at the craft services little tent and Norman signed all of the bananas. He was wrapped, he was leaving, he probably went over to get something to take away and [thought], ‘I think I’ll sign all these bananas.’ And he just signed all the bananas and left them in the bowl (laughs).

Melissa: Yeah. really… Dry the skins. Taxidermy bananas. There you go. Taxidermy bananas.