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"   Photo: AMC  As if Halloween wasn&amp;#039;t ghoulish enough, this Sunday at 10 p.m. AMC airs the first episode of it&amp;#039;s much-anticipated zombie epic, The Walking Dead, based on Robert Kirkman&amp;#039;s acclaimed comic series. Frank Darabont, the Oscar-nominated writer-director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile helms the series, and he&amp;#039;s cast one of his go-to actresses, Laurie Holden, as Andrea, a lawyer-turned-zombie slayer. Holden, who starred in Darabont&amp;#039;s The Majestic and his cult adaptation of Stephen King&amp;#039;s The Mist, tells us about how her character has changed from the page to the screen and how she&amp;#039;d compose herself in a world were the undead roam. (And by now, she&amp;#039;s got the experience to boot.) ELLE: On Sunday, comic fans will see that your character has undergone a bit of transformation. Tell us about it.LH: Yeah, the character of Andrea in our show is a different from the Andrea in the comic book. Her character was 12 years younger than I am, and she was a kind of footloose, fancy-free law clerk when you first saw her. In our version, Andrea is\u2014or was, in the old world\u2014a passionate human rights lawyer. You never see her bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You see her in the middle of a post-apocalyptic world, fighting off zombies.ELLE: What was the process of re-imagining the character like?LH: When Frank was fleshing out the show&amp;#039;s characters, he asked me what kind of lawyer I thought Andrea was. I said she should be a human rights lawyer, who&amp;#039;s made a life of fighting for the abused and persecuted. Then the zombie apocalypse hits and suddenly there are no more courtrooms, but she&amp;#039;s just as impassioned about helping other survivors stranded in the new world. She has a firm moral code, and she wants to restore order somehow. ELLE: Do you think you&amp;#039;d react that way if you were dropped into a grim, undead world?LH: I would like to think that if the world fell apart, my higher nature would prevail too. I&amp;#039;m a founding member of the Canadian Somaly Mam Foundation and an advisory board member for the US Somaly Mam Foundation, which fight human trafficking in Southeast Asia. That&amp;#039;s something that I&amp;#039;m very passionate about. So in that way, we&amp;#039;re interwoven, Andrea and I. ELLE: What&amp;#039;s it like on set, surrounded by hordes of zombies?LH: It&amp;#039;s surreal. Our makeup and effects team are geniuses and the zombies are frightening! I&amp;#039;ve had a lot of nightmares, to be honest. It really plays with your mind. ELLE: Did you read the comics before you began filming?LH: When Frank offered me the role, I sat down and read Compendium One of the books, and it was just amazing. I had never read a comic book like this before. I didn&amp;#039;t even know such a thing existed, such a dark and utterly fascinating graphic novel. I was captivated and just had to say, &amp;quot;Sign me up!&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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