The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 2 Casts The Resident Star Manish Dayal

There's a new resident of The Walking Dead Universe. Manish Dayal, best known for his role as Devon Pravesh on six seasons of The Resident, has been cast in a recurring role in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol. According to Deadline, which broke the news, Dayal's character Ash is described as "an engineer from Boston who moved to the family weekend house in Maine after the onset of the apocalypse. Ash lives by a strict schedule based mostly around his daily flights in a retrofitted single engine plane and mysterious visitations to his backyard greenhouse."

Dayal's prior credits include Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Disney+ movie Rise, Netflix animated series Fast & Furious Spy Racers, and AMC's Halt and Catch Fire. AMC already released the first look at Dayal's Ash in the first Daryl Dixon season 2 trailer, showing the TWDU newcomer asking Carol (Melissa McBride): "Would you give up everything to look for somebody you haven't met?" 

The first season of the Walking Dead spinoff ended with Carol traveling to the town of Freeport, Maine, in search of best friend Daryl (Norman Reedus), after he disappeared in the Pine Tree State. As was revealed to the viewer over six episodes, a hoodwinked Daryl wound up on a zombie-freighting French cargo ship and was marooned overseas in France.

McBride made a voice cameo in the penultimate episode of the season before reprising her Walking Dead role for a coda sequence that ended the October season finale. Reedus and McBride are series regulars alongside returning cast members Clémence Poésy (as Isabelle), Louis Puech Scigliuzzi (as Laurent), Laika Blanc Francard (as Sylvie), Anne Charrier (as Madame Genet), Romain Levi (as Codron), and Eriq Ebouaney (as Fallou).

With Ash being a pilot, the description suggests that Dayal's character could fly Carol across the Atlantic for a potential reunion with Daryl. Meanwhile, over in France, Daryl has delivered Laurent to Union de L'Espoir's (Union of Hope) base at The Nest: a settlement in Mont-Saint-Michel, Normandy, which is under threat from Madame Genet's Guerrier ("Warriors") and the Pouvoir Du Vivants ("Power of the Living").

"Without spoiling anything on Daryl's side of the story, we leave him with this conundrum, this dilemma about a guy who's trying to get home to the family that he's always had back home — with Judith and RJ and Carol and Connie — but a guy who, in the meantime, has also formed this other family and bond in France that needs him and wants him there and where he has developed a certain sense of belonging," showrunner David Zabel told ComicBook when previewing Daryl Dixon season 2. "So we certainly continue that narrative. That dilemma that we set up at the end of [episode] six is a big part of the early going of when we come back. We don't just drop that and we don't skip it. We continue telling that story in various ways and we continue telling the story of the threat of the Ampers, the amped-up walkers that Genet is cultivating as an army."

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol is scheduled to premiere in 2024 on AMC and AMC+.