The Walking Dead: Are Billy and Ben Coming to the Show?

As you would expect with such a painfully long wait between seasons, fans of The Walking Dead are getting rabid.  Season 5 ended in such a way to leave us dying for me, just as the season before it did with keeping the group locked up in Terminus.  Wondering what happens next, fans have been looking for whatever information they can find to try and get some hints, and recent casting calls have given us an idea of what kinds of new characters we’ll be seeing this fall.

Aside from a short, brown-haired female and “biker-type” men and women, producers of The Walking Dead are also seeking to cast a pair of male twins.  No additional information about the characters of the twin brothers was given, other than that it will be a very featured role on the show.

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Comic readers might be wondering if the twins in question are referring to Ben and Billy.  For those unaware, in the comics (COMIC SPOILERS AHEAD!), a pair of young twin boys named Ben and Billy, along with their parents Allen and Donna, were a part of the original group in Atlanta.  After each of their parents are killed in separate incidents, Ben and Billy are adopted by Dale and Andrea.  Their story comes to a tragic end when Ben murders Billy, thinking he’ll come back to life; Carl then kills Ben because nobody else will.

So, does the casting call for twin boys mean that Ben and Billy are now coming to the TV series?  More than likely, no.  First of all, the TV series has already done its own version of Ben and Billy’s story, only with two original characters: Lizzie and Mika.  Retelling Lizzie and Mika’s story, with one sibling killing the other due to a delusion, would be too redundant.

It’s also worth pointing out that, in a way, Ben was already included on the show back in Season 3.  Traveling with Tyreese and Sasha was a family of three, named Allen, Donna and Ben— the same names of Billy and Ben’s parents.  However, rather than being a young boy with a sibling, Ben was an older teenager with no brother, and he was eventually killed during Merle’s ambush against the Governor and Woodbury.

It’s still possible that these twin males could be called Billy and Ben.  There can be more than one character named Ben on the show, if that’s the route producers decide to go in.  However, their story would have to be totally different, so it’s almost completely pointless to bother adapting the two.  That’s why I don’t think the twins the show is looking for are going to be Ben and Billy, but rather, an original pair of characters developed exclusively for the TV series.

The Walking Dead returns with new episodes on AMC in October 2015.