There are many things that strike fear in the hearts of those of us living in Los Angeles. There’s the fear of the Big One. There’s the fear of a water shortage. There’s the fear of driving on the 405 during daylight. There’s the fear of being accosted by a drunken Housewife of Beverly Hills. Thanks to AMC, the network that brings you The Walking Dead, Angelenos can now be afraid of a zombie apocalypse.

The Walking Dead spinoff, Fear The Walking Dead, takes place in Los Angeles. Where in The Walking Dead, viewers were thrown into a world where zombies had already taken over, Fear The Walking Dead lets viewers see the start of the zombie apocalypse as it happens through the characters’ eyes.

One of those characters is Nick Clark, played by Frank Dillane (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), a 19-year-old heroin addict. He’s one of the first witnesses to a zombie attack. Dillane and Executive Producer Dave Alpert talked about everything from preparing for a zombie apocalypse to a Donald Trump zombie to, of course, Fear The Walking Dead.

So just tell us about the show. Is this different than just another show about zombies?

Dave Alpert: I certainly hope so. I mean we’ve always said this is not a zombie show. It’s a character drama that has zombies in it. But it’s not a zombie show first and foremost. So I really hope that people take it that way as well.

How much research did you do to decide how fast society would fall? Did you check with the CDC?

Dave Alpert: I was never really into the whole survival instinct thing but now after six seasons of The Walking Dead and a season of Fear the Walking Dead, I’ve changed my life. First of all, these are true facts. So 72 hours after interruption of services to a major US city, there’s no food. Done. 72 hours, that’s it. Any city in the world, 72 hours. So that’s scary and terrifying, right? That’s scary and terrifying even if we live in a place that had water. LA doesn’t. I have a go bag in my car. A go bag has enough food to last for a week, usually. It has a first aid kit, a knife, a poncho, tarps, and rubbing alcohol. I also have a satellite phone and you can use a SIM card for the sat-phone.

My wife and I have prearranged meeting places, because obviously when the apocalypse happens, the cell phone service will go away. Landlines are done. Forget it. You need to know where to meet with your loved one and you have to figure out if this accident happens here, here or here and you can’t get to those places, you need a backup plan. I also have like a drum in my house It has 500 gallons of fresh water, a diesel generator with enough fuel to run five days. So yeah, I’ve got a lot of research on those, a lot of research.

What’s the best place to hide in LA to survive?

Dave Alpert: You’ve got to get out of LA. You’ve got to get out of LA fast.

Where should we go?

Dave Alpert: You either you want to go south depending on where you are or you want to get over the second hill, right. So there’s the San Fernando Valley, we want to get past that.

So Lancaster…

Dave Alpert: Lancaster. You want to get to like Magic Mountain, up in that area. It’s safe there, it’s less populated, there’s a little to the coast that actually gets a little bit of rainfall so actually we have some vegetables that grow there. It’s a good place to go.

Nice. So is that [what these characters do]?

Dave Alpert: No, I don’t think these guys go anywhere.

Is it important to you that this is a realistic take on zombies or is it an assumption?

Frank Dillane: No, no. I think the realism is important with anything, I guess. Yes, it was important, but I think it’s more important than anything to an actor, to be reaching into something.

How did they describe it to you?

Frank Dillane: They didn’t really. It was all very secretive because I wasn’t given any script. I wasn’t given any sides. I was told very little. I didn’t know it was going to look the way it looked, I didn’t know it was going to be a slow burner – apparently people are saying that. I didn’t know that it was going to be – I don’t want to say realistic, a sort of angle placed in a family drama whatever that is. So I didn’t really know any of these things.

How did you build your character?

Frank Dillane: I think you lean yourself towards the point of view that the character holds and just slowly become him. I think you just empathize with what he has gone through or look through his eyes or wear his shoes and slowly human beings are very malleable. Like Michelangelo saw women in the rocks and he just chipped away old crap, all that rubble and these women really formed. I try and see acting like that – that I have every character ever written inside me and it lives and breathes inside me. All I have to do is chip away their irrelevant stuff and you’ll find that your mind is changed very quickly. Just empathy, empathy, empathy.

How do you write and act a teenage character or a young adult character without having them having that annoying feature of being angry at the world? Do you want to bring something that feels actually real? And does the zombie apocalypse kind of bring something new to teenager or young adult issues?

Dave Alpert: This is supposed to make it that how do we make it not a cliché character was we wanted to start from a real person. Like the idea is really to say these characters are – they’re not referential to other television show characters in LA like we were like, oh, it’s kind of like this, but not kind of like this. Like this is, like no this is Nick, we’re going to – let’s build Nick. And you know one of the things that we thought was interesting was, having watched Carl grow up on “The Walking Dead,” he kind of – all he knows is the apocalypse, right? So it’s like he has come of age inside the apocalypse.

Adults have their worldview formed, so there’s something great about that on the cusp of childhood and adulthood where you have preconditions as to what your world is going to be. Nick, without the apocalypse, could still recover and become a productive member of society, or might become a degenerate and die of loneliness. We know both are possibilities, right? So there’s the infinite within that is stealth and that’s a really interesting place to see. People who have started to develop those deeply held things that have become tenants for their life. We’re really going to talk about it and that was sort of an exciting thing for us to play with.

Is diversity important for the show?

Dave Alpert: It’s a big part of the show because it’s a big part of society. We feel that if you set a show in Los Angeles, that’s the reality of what happens here. We need to address the growing Latino population. It was done through a creative perspective and a realistic perspective as opposed to a perspective of marketing. I’m trying to figure out some sort of joke to make about Donald Trump, but I’m getting nothing. I would say that we should actually. I think he is a zombie. He is a force of evil in this world and he needs to go away.

So there’s a joke.

Dave Alpert: I was trying to figure out that one.

I saw the pilot, and your character is already living his own apocalypse. How are you going to survive that the apocalypse? Is it going to be easier for you?

Frank Dillane: If he survives.

If he survives, yes. How will you handle it?

Frank Dillane: He’s not a drug addict, so drugs aren’t the problem. Drugs are the solution and reality is the problem. If you are an addict, you have one concern and that’s where my next fix is. We have thousands of concerns but for an addict he has one concern and that’s life, life, life. Where can I live, how can I live, where is the life? And he’s dying if he’s not getting a fix, so I think he is already – he’s got that single-minded conviction. It’s an analogy I will keep on using because it’s one that really helped me so much is that heroin is like a drug where you’re constantly living and dying according to the nature of your addiction or your fix. So when you don’t get your fix, your cells officially actually start to die and degrade and that’s why they shrink and start to die and then when you get your fix, these cells start to get reborn again.

You are constantly in this cycle of life and death. You are close to this or you are vibrating very close to the surface, that is, you are closer to death than you are closer to life than everyone else. It is why heroin addicts have this strange quality of being incredibly childish and yet looking and being incredibly old and it‘s because they are. I have a friend who was an addict for years and years, and he’s lost all the years that he was an addict. It’s still like talking to a 16-year-old boy because he [became] an addict [at that age], and he stayed. What’s that Len Cohen lyric? ‘Some needle, I put it in my arm, it did some good and it did some bad.’

Is there something that the show kind of does with the apocalypse, questioning how we look in terms of people, the strength to being functional human beings in a society that’s changed? And then if someone who has been an addict becomes someone who’s prepared for the end of the world, is that something that the show can..

Dave Alpert: That’s what’s interesting about [addicts and a zombie apocalypse] really because in a strange way, they are actually well suited for each other. [Addicts] are used to putting their goals and their desires over anybody else. They are used to sort of subverting their morality, right? So they are well suited to these types of situations because while other people might hesitate to do questionable, morally questionable things, in that moment they might get killed or they might not make the right choices and might die. The addict follows – I need to get it and that’s all that matters. That’s all that matters. My family, my loved ones, my promises, those don’t matter. So what’s interesting is that addiction mentality in a way can be a positive for the character’s survival in this world. And we are also playing with the notion that of withdrawal right? All of us are addicted to something. Living in Los Angeles, we are addicted to the water. So what happens when that’s pulled away? How does withdrawal set in, how does an individual in a society – and I think that withdrawing things will come to depend on poor sustenance of life. It is a really clear way to create a base character.

As far as the time line, did you decide how you wanted to stretch for the first two seasons while Rick [in The Walking Dead] is asleep in a coma [and wakes up post-apocalypse]?

Dave Alpert: The first season takes us mainly through the coma. For season 2, we haven’t fully figured out the time line aspect of it. Once the apocalypse has fully kicked in, the connection between Atlanta and Los Angeles is gone. So the connection between downtown LA and Santa Monica is gone. The world shrinks to my family, my house, my rooms, the three things in front of me that I can see. We want to narrow that world for you fast and furious.

Fear The Walking Dead premieres on AMC August 23.