The Walking Dead: Andrew Lincoln Reveals "Years" of Planning Went Into Rick and Michonne Reunion

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live premieres February 25 on AMC.

By Haley Miller

There's just one week until The Walking Dead fans reunite with two of the most beloved characters in the franchise, Andrew Lincoln's Rick Grimes and Danai Gurira's Michonne. In season 9 of The Walking Dead, Rick blew up a bridge to protect his group from invading walkers. He was then picked up via helicopter by the mysterious CRM group and hasn't been seen on the show since. Lincoln's departure came at a time where he wanted to be more present in his family life at home after filming hundreds of episodes of The Walking Dead. When he made the ultimate sacrifice, veryone presumed him dead -- everyone except Michonne. Since then, Michonne's arc has largely centered around finding Rick and bringing him back home to his family because she's found more than a few clues that he may not have perished after all.

That episode aired nearly six years ago. Prior to the six-episode limited series being announced, there were years of planning three Walking Dead films largely centered around Rick that would act as his swan song. However, the pandemic hit and sent everything awry, including the plans for the three films. Thus they were scrapped and replaced with The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, first announced at SDCC 2022. Lincoln and Gurira, who are executive producers on the series, sat down with Comicbook.com to discuss the show and the long-awaited reunion between Richonne.

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"We wrote it, so we knew that we wanted…We've been working for a couple of years and meeting in conference rooms in hotels, spitballing these ideas," Lincoln told Comicbook.com. "And we said, well, how, what is the most insane reunion? Can we imagine? What about this? What about that? And we just thought, well, this, we landed on this and it felt also the structure as you know, is quite unique with the time frames that we've got these two people that have left the show in different time frames. We need to work that out. But also we just thought it would be the most thrilling, insane, emotional reunion. And we're glad that it was a shock."

Per the synopsis, the series is "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?"

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