Longtime The Walking Dead cast members Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira surprised fans at Comic-Con today with an appearance at Hall H—teasing an upcoming limited series that will wrap up story arcs for their respective characters of Rick Grimes and Michonne, which will premiere on February 25, 2024. During Friday’s Walking Dead Fan Watch Party at San Diego Comic-Con, AMC at last revealed the title of the long, long-awaited spinoff that is set to reunite Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira as star-crossed lovers Rick and Michonne: The Walking Dead: The Ones who Live.
The latest TWD spinoff will present an epic love story of two characters changed by a changed world. Kept apart by distance. By an unstoppable power. By the ghosts of who they were. Rick and Michonne are thrown into another world, built on a war against the dead… And ultimately, a war against the living. Can they find each other and who they were in a place and situation unlike any they’ve ever known before? Are they enemies? Lovers? Victims? Victors? Without each other, are they even alive — or will they find that they, too, are the Walking Dead? The Walking Dead Universe’s Chief Content Officer Scott M. Gimple will serve as showrunner for the series, with Lincoln and Gurira as EPs. The show is set to launch with six episodes on February 25th.
Synopsis episode 1
In another world, built on a war against the dead, Rick Grimes and Michonne attempt to find each other and who they were.
Lucifer Fave Lesley-Ann Brandt Joins TWD’s Rick/Michonne Spinoff
Lucifer alum Lesley-Ann Brandt has booked a key recurring role in The Walking Dead‘s Rick-and-Michonne spinoff.
According to Deadline, Brandt will recur as a character named Pearl Thorne, though no character details have been made available.
Danai Gurira Teases Richonne Reunion With Andrew Lincoln
Gurira teased the upcoming series on New Year’s Day as she took to Instagram to share a selection of behind-the-scenes photos (see below) with Lincoln and Walking Dead executive producer Scott Gimple.
“#Richonne spin-off. 2023. Pre-production is in full swing. We’re getting there!” she wrote alongside the images.
The Walking Dead stars react on the news
“It was great. We knew they were coming,” Norman Reedus said when he stopped by EW’s Comic-Con video suite Saturday with the rest of his castmates. “[Lincoln]’s in the room right next to mine, so I had a chat with him all night before that. It’s great seeing them.”
Reedus’ reunion with Gurira went a little differently, though. “Danai, I was sitting on my patio and I get a text and she’s like, ‘Is that you sitting in the dark up there in a bathrobe?'” he recalled. “And I’m like looking like, where are you? That goes on for 20 minutes, and then she walked up and screamed. So it was good to see Danai.” He then joked, “Andy I don’t really care about, but I really love Danai.”
The showrunner breaks down on the news
Speaking at The Walking Dead Universe Preview 2020 special live on Sunday’s Talking Dead, Gimple said, “I’ve been working on it very, very deeply with Danai and with Andy, and we continue to work on it pretty much every day together with some Walking Dead vets and some great new voices.”
“It’s an epic love story, but it’s an epic and insane love story. These are two people that have been separated for a very long time. They’ve lived whole other existences, and they have to find themselves again, let alone each other. It’s hopefully going to be mind-blowing.”
The series is expected to pick up six years after a severely injured Rick disappeared aboard a Civic Republic Military helicopter in a 2018 episode of The Walking Dead. Following Rick’s disappearance, Michonne set about to find her partner and return him home to their children. According to the show’s official synopsis, the story will see “Rick and Michonne thrown into another world, built on a war against the dead… And ultimately, a war against the living.”
“We see this incredible power couple, but we also see that Red Machete Rick,” Gimple added, referring to Rick’s bloody showdown with the Terminus cannibals in the show’s fifth season. “It kind of goes coast to coast that way,” he said, “between the intimate and the epic and the insane.”
About Rick Grimes and Michonne
Lincoln’s character is a Sheriff who led the show’s pack of survivors for its first nine seasons. He’s presumed dead by members of his clan as of Season 9’s fifth episode “What Comes After,” after blowing up a bridge with dynamite to stave off hordes of walkers, and while he subsequently disappears, we learn that he has, in fact, survived, as he helicopters off with Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh) and her allies.
Gurira’s Michonne is a katana-wielding survivor first introduced in Season 3 who joins Grimes’ group and eventually falls for him, becoming a surrogate mother to his kids. The character last appeared in Season 10, setting off to find Rick after learning that he may have survived his near mortal Season 9 injury.
Logline
the series presents an epic love story of two characters changed by a changed world. Kept apart by distance. By an unstoppable power. By the ghosts of who they were. Rick and Michonne are thrown into another world, built on a war against the dead… and ultimately, a war against the living. Can they find each other and who they were in a place and situation unlike any they’ve ever known before? Are they enemies? Lovers? Victims? Victors? Without each other, are they even alive — or will they find that they, too, are the Walking Dead?”
Synopsis
“Rick and Michonne are thrown into another world, built on a war against the dead… and ultimately, a war against the living. Can they find each other and who they were in a place and situation unlike any they’ve ever known before? Are they enemies? Lovers? Victims? Victors? Without each other, are they even alive — or will they find that they, too, are the Walking Dead?”
“The original reason is the fact that I don’t actually enjoy looking at myself,” Lincoln said then. “It’s a self-conscious thing of watching myself and going, ‘Oh I like it when I do that. That’s kind of cool.’ And then, ‘Oh, I don’t like it when I do that.’ And that defeats the object of what I want to do as an actor, which is to try and be in the role and not be self-conscious. I watch great actors that I admire beyond all things and I see them replicate [themselves], and it’s very hard not to. I don’t want to do that. I just want to leave myself alone as much as I can. It breaks the spell, it breaks the magic somewhat.”
And watching it meant watching himself. Taking on the executive producer role was “a huge error of judgment,” jokes Lincoln… at least we think he’s joking. Because that meant taking on executive producer duties in putting the show together. And you can’t exactly put the show together unless you… you know… watch the show. “We had to get into the edit,” Lincoln explains. “And you can’t call yourself a producer and go, ‘Thanks, guys! I’m done. Good luck with the edit.’”
So what was it like for Lincoln to have to watch himself playing Rick Grimes on The Ones Who Live? “I mean, it was the belly of the beast,” he says. “It was like aversion therapy. I had a week of vomiting in my car while looking at it, but then was able to distance myself. The way I was able to watch it and get through the initial shock of me playing Rick was focusing on everybody else in it. It was amazing to sort of watch.”
“Jadis has had one of the bigger journeys in the TWDU,” says Gimple. “And The Ones Who Live pushes her story into crazier, unexpected places.”
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So how and when did you find out that you were going to be able to play Jadis again on now your third different Walking Dead show?
POLLYANNA McINTOSH: It was about five months before Jadis left The Walking Dead that I knew that she was going to carry on. So I’ve been looking forward excitedly to this leg of the journey for all that time. And then World Beyond was just an added beautiful bonus where I got to come in and play her then and bring another crazy haircut to the world — which was my stupid decision because then I had to do it again for this one. I was like, “Oh s—, we have to go back to Dumb and Dumber.”
I did that because I wanted her to be like Joan of Arc. I wanted her to be on this mission that to her was essential and the right way to go. I wanted to make it clear in the story from World Beyond and now in The Ones Who Live that in her eyes what she’s doing is the right thing. And I also thought it gave it a bit of a military edge with that shave. I wanted to give a nod to the original Jadis because I’d been Anne in between, who was a very different character and I wanted to say, “Yeah, Jadis is back. Don’t get comfortable.”
So when you wrapped on World Beyond, you knew then there was more coming with the character?
Yeah, it was always going to be Rick’s story with Jadis and Michonne. Certainly, I knew it would be Jadis and Rick. And then of course I figured you’ve got to have Michonne in there. And because that hadn’t happened in World Beyond, I knew that we’d still have this coming. So it was always that. But it was a beautiful call from Scott in lockdown saying, “We’re doing that thing, but can you also do this other thing and come to World Beyond?” So it wasn’t a question for me when we wrapped World Beyond as to whether we’d be doing The Ones Who Live or not. It was always going to be the plan, because we want to see Rick, right? The question I get asked the most in my life for the last four and a half years is, “What have you done with Rick?”
As you mentioned, she’s a very different Jadis on World Beyond than when she left The Walking Dead. So what kind of Jadis are we going to meet here?
There will be some of the Jadis that you will recognize from World Beyond. She is in the position of Warrant Officer Jadis Stokes. She is still working with the Civic Republic and the Civic Republic Military. So she’s a committed follower of the CRM, but people are not just their jobs, and the old Jadis that we got to know and who has tried her best but has lost many times is a big driving undercurrent of where she’s coming from.
It’s interesting how you mentioned the last name again of Stokes. And look, that’s a character in Gabriel that’s still out there. Should they cross paths, how do you think that might go for her?
Jadis has experienced the pain of loving before. I don’t think she feels there’s a lot of place for that in the apocalypse. She would like there to be. She feels that if the CRM achieve their goals, there can be a world in which we can all go and be in love and have relationships. But as it stands, that can’t be part of her world. That’s just not going to fly with what she has to do.
I think if she and Gabriel were to meet again, she’d have a lot of explaining to do, and there are two people who felt very strongly for each other, but their worldviews are so opposing. But anything can happen in The Walking Dead, as we know. So I think one of the most wonderful things for me as a fan of it is these extraordinary arcs that the characters go on and how you can still always be surprised.
What was it like being back on set with Andrew Lincoln and some of your Walking Dead family?
Oh, it was just wicked. It was truly like the band’s back together. Being that character and getting to connect with another actor and getting to fully go there is just the greatest joy of my work. And Andy is one of those actors who is fully present. He’s fully there, he’s fully in the scene, he’s fully in the character. Anything can happen. There’s such a freedom to it. And so getting to see him again was just a delight.
And getting to work with him again in those scenes, it was like they changed every time. The more pissed off or upset or disappointed or worn down he played it, the more I had to question as Jadis what I was doing. The tougher and more macho he played it, the more I thought, “F— you, you arrogant little prick. It’s not all about you. There’s work to be done here!” And I’m talking about the character. Obviously, Andy could never be an arrogant little prick. So that was just the most wonderful reminder of the days on Walking Dead working together.
Anything else you can say about this show and how it is similar to or different from the original series?
The setting and the locations are very different. The spirit is all there. I’d say it’s a lot of action, it’s a lot of pathos, and it’s a whole lot of love. Look at that! That’s a greeting card! But that’s what it is. And, to me, it’s very much in the spirit of the original. It’s just that we’ve never seen Rick in this situation before.
Danai Gurira Had Andrew Lincoln Watch ‘Bridgerton’ Before Shooting Their ‘Walking Dead’ Spinoff to Inspire Their Characters’ Love Story
“It’s not about relating to it, it’s about a love story that accomplished what it was proposing. It had a very clear world, it had very clear characters, very clear pursuits, very clear storyline arc.”
“The satisfaction that I feel, the reason [the show] is so popular, is there’s a satisfaction that the love stories cumulate and I wanted [Andrew and Scott], because of course they hadn’t watched it, so I wanted them — I would just text them key scenes, I’d tape them on my phone, just for them to see what this is and you see why this works,” the star continued. “There are really scenes where even the characters aren’t sure of what they’re doing, or they’re doing things that aren’t quite what they want to be doing or they’re working against their real goals or their real heart, but the love is clear and the language works with it so beautifully.”
Gurira compared it to how as a writer herself, sometimes when she gets writers block she reads an August Wilson play, “not because I’m trying to be August Wilson, not because I’m trying to find his words in my head, it’s because his narratives accomplish what they propose. He has a very specific world, and he’s got an unabashedly unapologetic voice, so it reminds me of my own. So that’s what I was trying to do for these dudes.”
For what has been called the most romantic of The Walking Dead stories, Gimple said the spinoff explores “love being the fuel for a survival story,” and “these two characters’ love, being as intense as it is, being the soulmates that they are, the crazy that they both possess, it was a no-brainer” for what the new series would focus on.
The trio also took inspiration from “Casablanca, Somewhere in Time, old school — we talked about a lot of romances and aspects of it. It’s not a one-to-one comparison in our world but a love story always has an obstacle; now in our story the obstacle is massive: It’s the dead, it’s the situation that they find themselves in,” Gimple added. “Whether it’s a rom-com or Bridgerton or whatever, there is something keeping people apart. In this though, there’s a world that has changed these people, and in some ways they’ve got to find themselves first before they find each other.”
“It was great to be the sheriff again,” he said. “I missed the people. I missed the culture of the show.”
It wasn’t hard for Lincoln to get back into character as Rick Grimes after a few years away. “It was remarkably easy to put the cowboy boots back on,” he said. But the type of story he wants to tell about Rick Grimes has changed.
“I think in the writers room, there was a real intention to place Rick in an environment and a mindset that he had not been before,” he said. “I think that was quite key, because he had been pushed and pulled and stretched and pummeled and abused in the main series for so long, traumatized, that we thought, where can we place him? So it was a new adventure, and that made it very, very exciting and appealing, obviously.”
That story is a love story. There have always been romantic storylines on The Walking Dead, but never the front-and-center, most important storyline like Rick and Michonne’s is on The Ones Who Live. Lincoln said that The Walking Dead started with Rick searching for his family, and that’s in the DNA of The Ones Who Live, only told in a more “operatic” way than it ever has before. “It is an epic love story. That was the ambition. And I’m really glad that we got to really land the love aspect,” he said.
“This is the ultimate love story; this is the apocalypse meets an epic love story, and we didn’t really get a lot of space for that in the mothership because there were so many other stories going on at the same time, but this story is all about, does love win out in this world?” Gurira told Variety.
Appearing at the TCA winter press tour on Tuesday, Andrew Lincoln said of the awaited Rick/Michonne spinoff premiering Feb. 25, “This has been a long time coming, this story, and this is a love story. The DNA of the original [The Walking Dead] episode was a man in search of his family, and that DNA is very much in this story — but we wanted to sort of make it a bit more operatic.”
“It’s like Disneyland!” explains the director Michael E. Satrazemis of the chase. Sure, if Disneyland was occupied by flesh-eating zombies and a foe-turned-friend-turned-foe with an absolutely unconscionable haircut. “This is designed to scare the s— out of you, because I love you so much,” Satrazemis beams to the actors before breaking into a laugh. “It’s going to be f—ing great!”
“Knowing Andy, and knowing that he wasn’t going to be on the show forever, I started laying down some of the aspirational foundation maybe as far back as season 6,” Gimple says of the origins for the most anticipated Walking Dead spinoff yet. The story architect started planning for the inevitable and laying out a master idea that would leave the door open for a possible return, while also setting up years in advance what that eventual story might look like. “I started working on a big mythology. People were like, ‘Helicopters? What are you talking about?’”
So when Lincoln did finally exit the series, “I had those tracks laid,” says Gimple. “I had the very general idea: The character is taken away from home and the people he loves. He’s going to want to get home. What are the obstacles to that, and what changes him?”
But why would Lincoln want to return home to a character he already spent close to a decade playing? “If I’d walked off into the sunset, it would’ve been easier not to come back,” says the actor. “But because I went away on a bit of a cliffhanger, for the last five years people have been saying, ‘Where have you gone? When are you coming back?’ So it sort of felt impolite not to finish a story that was left dangling.”
There was one other much simpler reason as well. “I miss the sheriff, man,” Lincoln laughs. “He’s a great guy and he’s a complicated cat.”
“It’s a lot of things that we’re sort of facing now as society,” notes Lincoln. “Are we empire building again? Are we able to have these big great institutions that were set up after the Second World War, and are they still functioning in the way that we want them to? There was a lot that was percolating that probably informed a lot of the ideas.”
There will be both friends and foes within the CRM. One ally at the outset is another captive named Pearl Thorne — played by Lucifer’s Lesley-Ann Brandt, who chose The Ones Who Live over a pilot offer for a Ben McKenzie series titled The Hurt Unit after receiving a personal note from Lincoln. “I’d say, in a lot of ways, she’s sort of like the female version of Rick,” Brandt says of her character. “Thorne is someone who, once she makes a decision, she’s very strong. She’s a fighter. She was trying to get back to her love in Cape Town and found herself stuck somewhere where she didn’t want to be. In that way, they’re very similar in their pursuit of love and family.”
While Rick and Thorne will be close, fret not, Richonne shippers: They won’t be too close. “It’s nice to see a male and female friendship,” says Brandt. “I’ve seen that with Carol and Daryl, and I love that relationship on the show. Those male and female relationships where there’s true genuine care and friendship for one another that’s completely platonic and has nothing to do with any of those romantic feelings — I mean, those exist in life.”
Rick will need that friendship and support if he is to survive those determined to keep him captive. McIntosh’s Jadis saved Rick by putting him on that helicopter to begin with, but as seen on World Beyond, she is now following every word of the CRM gospel, and as a Warrant Officer, her loyalty to the system supersedes any personal feelings for the man who took her in from the Heaps all those years ago.
TVLINE | How have Rick and Michonne changed since they were last together back in Season 9 of the mothership?
ANDREW LINCOLN |It was very much our intention to place Rick in a new world and a new mindset that we hadn’t seen before. What’s the joy of playing a character unless they can be pushed into different places? And I certainly think these lovers meet at a place that really compromises them both.
DANAI GURIRA |Before Michonne leaves the mothership, there’s this journey she goes on when she’s pregnant… where a friend of hers from college betrays her…. That shifted her in a way that it took her a long time to heal from, and when she shifted, she had to let go of searching for Rick. Once she finds these clues that he can’t have died, she’ll go to the ends of the Earth to find him.
TVLINE | In the past, there’s been no line that Rick wouldn’t cross to protect his people. Is there now?
LINCOLN |There isn’t. I mean, that was absolutely in his DNA [from the start]. That was the engine that drove him.
GURIRA |Michonne loved that about him.
TVLINE | Relatedly, Michonne has had stronger boundaries than Rick in the past. Does she still?
GURIRA |Boundaries in terms of what she will and will not do? Well, I don’t know. She’s done some crazy things. [She and Rick are] of the same mind. I always used to say that what she found very attractive [about him] was, you know… he bit out a man’s neck for Carl. Michonne was like, “Yes, bite out his neck, I’ll take the gun, shoot this one in the head, shoot that one, let’s go!”
LINCOLN |That’s very much in their story, that attitude, that sort of responsibility that they both share as heroes, that sometimes they have to do selfless things at the expense of [morality]. And that’s a big question that’s very much in this story, which is they do share that absolute.
You know, we talk about As and Bs from the main series; that’s very much a part of this that evolves into a much bigger question that they face later in the season.
TVLINE | On the mothership, Jadis was eager to sleep with Rick. Is that lust interest still there?
LINCOLN |They have a very unorthodox relationship. She saved his life and yet left him in a place where he can’t leave… She’s in it to win it for herself. So they are bound, both trapped in a game of cat-and-mouse.
GURIRA |But they couldn’t have more different hearts. What drives him and what drives her is like literally opposites.
TVLINE | Can we expect any updates on any other characters from The Walking Dead?
GURIRA |Possibly….
LINCOLN |There might be a couple more surprises.
TVLINE | How rewarding was it for the two of you as co-creators and executive producers to have more of a say in the characters and the story, and bringing this to life?
GURIRA |It was a powerful learning experience. I’ve written stuff [before], but to get in the trenches this way? I’ve never done that. Thankfully, I was with family. I was with Andy and [chief franchise officer Scott M.] Gimple… [It was very rewarding] being able to really arc like, “What should this moment be about? What is this leading to? Where is the love story there?” We all pushed each other.
TVLINE | You’re no longer the action figure. You’re playing with the action figure now.
GURIRA |Yeah, you’re playing with it, and you’re it at the same time! [Laughs]
LINCOLN |It was the two hats that you had to put on when you’re on set as well. You have to do your day job, you know? That was the sort of disconnect.
“We start at breaking points,” teases Gimple of this new chapter in Rick and Michonne’s love story. “At dark places, in dark situations.”
Despite the bleakness of their characters’ impending journeys back to each other, Lincoln and Gurira (both creators on Live with Gimple) enjoyed their return to Dead. “I’d missed [playing Rick] and everything that came with the job description,” Lincoln says. “It was relatively painless to slip back into the cowboy boots.”
For Gurira, portraying the katana-wielding badass again “felt very different and the same all at once.” She calls this Michonne the 2.0 version: “[Michonne is] stepping into very unknown terrain.”
Interview to Lesley-Ann Brandt
TVLINE | Where were you at when this opportunity presented itself to you? And what was the pitch like?
I had not watched [the original Walking Dead] myself, but I knew how big the show was. And originally the character was French, and I asked if they were open to other accents. Like, could I give them South African? Could I give them Kiwi? And they were like, “Yeah, South African is cool.” Unbeknownst to me, Andy [Lincoln] is half South African — his Mom is South African — and one the directors of the first episodes is South African, and the costume designer, Eulyn Hufkie, is from Cape Town. So, we had a whole South African conglomerate on this!
TVLINE | That’s amazing.
At the same time, I was actually up for The Hurt Unit pilot they had just booked Ben McKenzie on. We were trying to make both things work, but one shot in Vancouver, the other one [The Ones Who Live] shot in New Jersey. It got to the point where I basically had to choose projects, so I asked Lincoln — we’re both at CAA — and he sent me a really lovely email through his agent that said, “Look, we really want you to do this.” And I think I made the right choice, let’s just say. The other project was great and sadly it didn’t go. Things worked out the way they were supposed to.
TVLINE | What interested you about the character of Pearl Thorne? And did you have any questions going in?
Having an opportunity to play a South African on a huge [franchise] show was wonderful, especially one from my community. Danai [Gurira] studied in Cape Town, so she was excited too. It’s an accent you don’t hear very often. People have this idea of African accents, but it’s so different and so specific to Cape Town. Also, I was interested in the idea of exploring a platonic friendship in this world. I was very afraid that they would set this up as like a love triangle, and I was like I don’t want that heat. [Laughs] This is their [Rick and Michonne’s] love story, so I was happy.
Then, when I finally did get to New Jersey, getting to work with [Lincoln and Gurira] and collaborate with [TWD franchise COO] Scott [Gimple]…. Twelve years in, they care so much about the show. I’ve worked with people who are a bit jaded, but that’s not them. I came in having binged [The Walking Dead] from pilot to end, because I wanted to do right by the material, I wanted to understand the world and see how the show was shot, understand how [Rick and Michonne] get together. I felt a sense of responsibility, and I feel that way with all the work that I do — like, I read the comics for Maze on Lucifer, because I wanted to “get” that world as well. [With The Walking Dead] they truly created, like, one of the most epic television shows in history.
TVLINE | Oh, it’s huge. It was huge.
Huge. And when I think of my favorite moments on that show, it’s always about their relationships. It’s always moments of tenderness. When Norman Reedus breaks down as Daryl, it crushes me because you see that character and what he’s had to go through, that sense of vulnerability. When we lost Glenn, I was right there screaming at the television, “What the f–k are we killing this guy for?!”
TVLINE | Talk about choosing the specific Cape Town accent for Pearl, because it’s not the way you’re talking with me here right now. Her voice a little more clipped. It has edges to it.
Yeah, that’s what a Capetonian accent sounds like. Mine has softened over the years because, you know, I lived [in the States] — though now that I’m talking about South Africa, it will start to come out! [Editor’s note: It did.] South African accents are very hard. When my husband goes to Cape Town, he’s like, “My ear is always listening because I’m trying very hard to understand everyone.” But I chose it [for Pearl] because you had never heard it before on a big show like this. It’s different than [the 2009 sports biopic] Invictus and listening to Matt Damon do his accent. It was a huge help in actually crafting the character, because South Africans will be very… they’ll just get to the point. [Laughs] It can interpreted as being abrupt and rude.
TVLINE | That’s totally Pearl.
It’s like, “I don’t have time to give you rainbows and ponies,” know what I mean? It sounds harsh because I’m just getting to the point. There’s a brutal honesty to the accent as well. It’s not melodic, like Irish; this is very guttural, straight from the groin.
TVLINE | What’s important to Pearl when we first meet her?
Surviving in the world that she’s chosen to come to. We don’t see the backstory, but in my audition piece she was stuck on this boat after trying to get back to her love for years. She kept trying to cross the ocean to get back to Cape Town. And when Okafor (played by Snowfall‘s Craig Tate) meets her — I think I posted photos of me in my audition, where I had done some makeup on myself to have her look withered and beaten down — she decides, “OK, I’ll go with you, I will join [the CRM].” Coming from a military background, it’s easy to fall in line, I suppose.
TVLINE | How does she regard Rick Grimes? Is she sympathetic to his cause, his mission?
Yeah, but she does it in a very South African way. I think there’s a scene where she’s like, “Let’s get a drink before we kill each other.” It’s like, “I get it, I understand, those people that you loved they’re gone. But this is our world now, so we either are going to find some kind of joy while we’re doing it, or you’re going to keep trying to leave.” There’s a true friendship built there, where they really do believe that they’re doing the right thing. And that’s a metaphor, my God, for so many human decisions in the world! But yeah, I think she recognizes that he’s struggling a bit more than her to fit in, so she nurtures this friendship. And then the dynamics start to change.
TVLINE | What’s the coolest thing you got to do on The Ones Who Live?
One of the coolest moments was my first day on-set, Week 1. We started with night shoots, which is brutal — a 21-degree wind chill in New Jersey, and my African bones are not made for that East Coast living, Matt! I’m telling you right now! But I walked on-set and all of a sudden the walkers are there, and I was like, “Oh, s–t”. Andy’s standing next to me, the loveliest, most welcoming guy, and I’m like, “I’m on The Walking Dead. This is pretty dope.”
My other favorite moment is… my first scene with Danai, where it felt like two alpha women circling each other, saying things that aren’t being said but are being said. It’s like” game recognizes game.” Danai has such a presence onscreen — even when she’s not saying a lot, she’s saying a lot — so I had so much fun working with [her] in that way.
TVLINE | Lastly, how do you think Lucifer’s Maze would size her up?
Oh, these two would go toe-to-toe, for sure. They’re similar in a lot of ways, but I think where Maze is able to evolve her understanding of human experience, Thorne is stuck in the system.
Will there be a second season of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live?
“I would say ‘anything is possible,’” franchise CCO Scott Gimple answered at TCA. “We’re focused on this one right now, but this one came together in a really amazing way where there were all sorts of plans, and the world changed and we altered those plans, and we wound up with something we really liked.”
Andrew Lincoln about the idea of the spinoff
“I just bullied everybody into submission,” says Lincoln. “And there were quite a lot of conversations, particularly with AMC, with people going, ‘Now Andy, we love the idea, but are you really sure about this?’ But I just thought: This is the time to do what the comic book did and honor that. I’ve been trying to pitch this for years, and everybody was just shouting me down.”
And why was this the time to do it? Because fans are well aware of the “never quit” attitude of Rick Grimes. “We had to explain why Rick had never returned,” says Lincoln. “This is a guy that would do anything to return, so what is the most extraordinary act or effort that he would put himself through in order to try and get back to his beloved?”
In Episode 2 Michonne and Rick reunite.
“It was fun to explore that idea for her,” she says, “and to see how hard that was going to be.” Fans of the mothership certainly got a kick out of it when Melissa McBride turned Carol into a cookie-baking Carol Brady upon first arriving in Alexandria. The key to Michonne’s act, Gurira says, is that “she’s too smart to not do it entirely. When she chooses to get out of [that B act], sometimes it might be in error and sometimes it might be a choice. So we’ll see how it goes.”
The most heart-wrenching moment in Michonne’s journey occurred when — after spending a year recovering from a CRM gas attack — she and her new companion Nat (Matthew August Jeffers) sat at a campfire and Nat essentially gave Michonne permission to go home to her kids and still believe Rick was out there somewhere, telling her: “You can know when to go. You can do both. It’s not giving up.”
It was the episode’s most pivotal scene for Gurira. “She does get to a point where she’s going home,” the actress and executive producer says. “As strong-minded as she was being willing to fight through being chlorine-gassed and all of that, she was still looking to continue the fight and to get to him. But there comes that moment where even she has to accept things.”
And that acceptance led to tears. Lots of tears. “That moment for her at the fire is really her letting go in a way that is just unheard of for her,” Gurira says. “It kind of breaks her, but also sort of makes her. Because she’s a mission-driven person and a love-driven person, so she has to go to her other loves now, to her children, and that becomes where she’s going to. So that aspect of her breaking to that point and then finding him right at that point is this mirror. They’re sort of mirror episodes in that regard, because that is so not her, to let go the way she finally does in that episode.”
Of course, this being The Walking Dead franchise, not everybody got a happy ending in the episode, as Nat eventually paid with his life when being gunned down by a CRM soldier. It was a brutal end for a character that made such a huge impact in only a single episode. “What a glorious death,” says Gurira. “That was a fantastic death. His death was a thing of beauty. I was watching like, ‘Wow, look at that. That’s a great death. That’s impressive.’”
But while Okafor and Nat may not be the ones who live, the characters will live on in terms of the impact they made on Richonne. “The reverb of these characters in Michonne and in Rick plays out very much throughout the whole of the rest of the season,” Lincoln says. “They inform and make decisions and help these characters make decisions further down the story arc. So they don’t die. They sort of continue.”
Speaking of which, Rick tells Michonne that in order to survive, she needs to hide who she really is moving forward and not show the CRM that she is a leader. But knowing what we know of Michonne, is that even possible? “Michonne exudes a power, a charisma, and a strength that is difficult to hide,” Gimple says. “And so you can ask her to hide it. She might even try to hide it. I don’t know if she can hide it.”
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Chiara
Source: Deadline
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