It’s been 13 years since The Walking Dead first arrived on AMC like a sonic boom, kicking off a horror universe that has since spawned five spinoffs. A sixth series is arriving Feb. 25 on the network, and The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live marks both a major shift in the franchise and monumental return.
Andrew Lincoln, who played Rick Grimes until he left the series in Season 9 will return to The Ones Who Live alongside Danai Gurira, who starred as Michonne for seven seasons before departing in 2020. What might surprise fans of The Walking Dead Universe, as reporters learned Tuesday afternoon at the show’s Television Critics Association press conference in Los Angeles, is that, after more than a decade of gruesome violence, thrills, and intensity, The Ones Who Live is, at heart, “an epic love story.”
In fact, the chance to revisit the characters in this capacity is what convinced Lincoln and Gurira to return, with the pair also serving as executive producers and Gurira even writing one of the season’s pivotal episodes.
Against all odds in the still-zombie-infested world, the long-lost lovers pledge to find their way back to each other. “This is about two people who are soul mates, but their souls have been a little beat up by the world,” Scott Gimple, chief content officer of The Walking Dead Universe, told journalists. “And a lot of time has passed. They had to find each other, but they also had to find themselves.”
For fans of the series who tracked Rick and Michonne’s connection across the run, the romantic focus and the journey to a reunion is a long time coming—as much as it might seem like a hard pivot for this show known for its walkers and action sequences. (Those set pieces are still very much a part of The Ones Who Live.”
How did they approach tapping into that romance? “We watched a lot of Bridgerton,” Lincoln joked. “This has been a long time coming, this story. I love this character, and this is a love story. The original episode had very much the DNA in it that’s in this,” he added, connecting Rick’s search for his family at the start of The Walking Dead with his journey back to Michonne in this series. “We wanted to make it a bit operatic, and shade in what the grown ups in the universe have been doing while we’ve been scrambling around in the dirt.”
It was Gurira, Lincoln said, who “was beating the drum of the love story” approach to bringing these characters back.
“[Michonne’s] journey to find her man is not an easy one,” Gurira said. Infusing the Walking Dead Universe with a major romantic arc might cause fans to wonder whether or not it is still a true-and-true horror series in the way that the original series’ other spin-offs are. But that opened up myriad storytelling possibilities that made these character comebacks more exciting. “When love is the driving force and it is the propelling thing on the show, when it is the thing that makes the plot move, what did that look like?”
As for his own return to playing Rick after a years-long hiatus, Lincoln said, “It was remarkably easy putting the cowboy boots back on.” The writers room worked with “real intention to place Rick in an environment and a mindset that he’d not been before.” Referencing one noticeable difference to shooting the show now versus 13 years ago, he laughed: “My knees hurt a bit more. But apart from that, it was great to be the sheriff again. I missed it.”
