How ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Pulled Off Those Gnarly Finger-Removal Scenes

Here’s the good news: June (Jenna Elfman) is back on Fear the Walking Dead as of this week’s episode. The bad news? Spoilers past this point, but she’s down a digit after villain Shrike (Maya Eshet) cut off her trigger finger to keep her in line.

It’s going to make things very, very hard for June, who has been pulled back into doing harrowing medical experimentations in order to try and find a cure for the zombie virus by Shrike, and her organization PADRE. But June’s amputation is far from the first finger that was removed in the episode. In fact, when we reconnect with June after the show’s seven-year time jump, she’s been knocking out PADRE soldiers, stealing their trigger fingers, and keeping them in a jar in her house as trophies.

“The impetus for that was a conversation Ian [Goldberg] and I were having when we were trying to think of something that would really signify a dark past for June and the seven years, and wanting to see her for the very first time doing something that would, in everyone’s minds, be pretty shocking coming from June,” co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss told Decider. “It really just came from the idea of if she had a gun pointed at her forcing her to do something she didn’t want to do, how could she get back at the person who did that? We’re like, ‘Well, what if you cut off the trigger finger?'”

That’s all good in theory on the writing page, but in practice, you now have multiple characters, including a main member of the ensemble like June, who, er, don’t have their trigger fingers. It’s far from the first time a cast member on a Walking Dead series has been missing part of their bodies — a severed arm exchanged for some sort of weapon attachment is almost a franchise rite of passage at this point. But rather than hacking off a limb, June’s medical approach to dactylectomy, aka the act of removing a finger, added another level of challenge.

“It was a lot more complicated than we thought when we just wrote it,” Chambliss continued. “We actually had our set medic advising on a lot of the ways you would actually go about doing that from a medical perspective. That’s one of the things that makes it feel so brutal because it’s not just her taking a hatchet and chopping a finger off, but we see it’s methodical.”

Despite the grim circumstances, Elfman was actually excited to learn how to perform a dactylectomy. “They had a nurse medical consultant who was awesome and so patient, but she had to teach me, I had to come in happily days off on the prep time,” Elfman explained. “And I really care about doing it right. I want anyone who knows anything about this stuff, who’s an audience member, to not be taken out of it, to be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how you do it.’ I want to honor nurses always.”

For Elfman, that meant learning every stage of the process, from what type of knife to use, to where and how to inject the numbing agents so June can remove the fingers without waking her “patients.” And in fact, she headed to the show’s Savannah set two weeks early to go over the story with director Heather Cappiello, as well as to “practice, practice, practice” making sure everything looked right.

“This is something June has been doing four years now, and she was a trauma nurse,” Elfman recalled. “Everything’s precise, drilled, drilled, drilled, so you don’t have to think about it. Because also, she has a limited number of minutes to get this done and get out before they come to, and anything can become a liability.”

Once the action was in Elfman’s “muscle memory” she was ready to go. “So then when I’m filming, I can actually just play what’s happening with June. I’m not, as the actor, trying to coordinate myself with the props, which would take me out of the story. Rehearsing a scene until you don’t have to think about it, then you can truly be in the moment.”

And that’s all well and good, but by the end of the episode, June still doesn’t have a pointer finger. So how will the show handle that?

“There’s also the challenge going forward both for Shrike and for June because we had to build prosthetics so that every time we see them on screen, we’re not spending a fortune on VFX trying to paint their pointer fingers off,” Chambliss said. “We have solutions that we get to with both characters, one of which will be a spoiler. I will save that for the future, but a lot of thought went into it from a bunch of different departments on the show.”

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC and streams on AMC+.