Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead
Read on for my full interview with Lincoln as we touch upon Season 6's various threats, Morgan and Rick's ideological and moral disagreements, how the show is experimenting this year and why Lincoln thinks the world is ready for Negan.
IGN: Coming into this season, what do you think the biggest threat facing the group is? Walkers? Humans? Rick?
Lincoln: I think it's a combination. What you'll see this season is very much a spill-over from the end of last season with Rick not tolerating incompetence within the walls of Alexandria. I think that there is definitely an attitude from him that is "if you can't keep up with us, if you can't educate, then you don't belong." I do think that there's a lot of tension, particularly between him and the community that aren't his close family in Alexandria. You also have the unknown quantity of Morgan, who seems to be in direct opposition to Rick's ideology, combined with a bigger threat than we've ever seen before outside the walls. You will very quickly realize after episode 1 of the season that there is the most terrifying and biggest threat we've ever faced. It's like a monster movie.
Last year the Wolves storyline was this great mystery threaded throughout the season. How much of a focus are the Wolves going to be in the early part of Season 6?
Lincoln: Oh, rest assured that there are three or four different threats, all equally as terrifying and bigger than we've ever faced before, and they come in very quick succession in the first, I would say, three, four, five episodes. This season is the most ambitious and biggest season we've attempted. I kind of feel like we've maxed out on the ambition and what a crew is capable of doing in an eight-day shoot. Each episode is like a season finale in scale, in ambition and in story-telling, and it's been thrilling because of that. It's also been exhausting, but I hope that the audience enjoys it because the crew have busted gut to bring you what I think is so far the biggest season to date. But yes, there are three or four brutal, terrifying threats, all either walker or human or internal struggle, all sort of adding to the drama of the show. It is incredibly dramatic this season.
IGN: At what point does Rick become the anti-hero instead of the hero on this show? Or do you think he is already there?
Lincoln: That's a very interesting tightrope that we've been walking for the last few seasons. Always the thing that engaged me about the comic book was the fact that you follow very much the story through Rick's eyes and Rick's friends and family's eyes. If you step too far away from the story and aren't in their POV, you would question who are the baddies here, who are the goodies. I think that's always one of the enduring strengths of the comic book. I do think we have a different responsibility in the TV show because it is a different thing.
I think the moment that Rick chooses to do something that isn't about the safety of his family -- if he steps out of that intention and does something brutal and uncompromising for his own reasons -- then I think you start turning into the anti-hero. I'm not sure that we've ever really gone that far. I think he's done some terribly brutal and terrifying things, but generally the reason behind them have always been about safety and security and about his children or his Walking Dead family. I think it's an interesting area to explore, and we do go into it. Funny enough, in the back half of this season there is something that we've been wrestling with which is very ambiguous.
IGN: Ambiguous with Rick?
Lincoln: Yes. Well, a decision is made than can be questioned and is questioned, and I think that it causes a bigger conflict within the community rather than just the conflict that they face. I think it's really getting into very interesting psychological waters. You want to be deeper. It feels very, very interesting, and it's been hard to play it because it's an argument that there's no right or wrong answers to it. I'm speaking in mysterious code, which hopefully will make more sense when it plays out in the second half of the season. Certainly what you see at the moment is a man directly in action, not suffering fools or people who can't keep up, because the group faces the biggest threat that they've ever faced and you get it in the first three or four minutes of the returning episode.
IGN: And that's just one of several threats, as you mentioned.
Lincoln: Oh yes. We don't do it easy, this show. There's always three or four things that spell imminent danger or indeed death, and that's the way we roll on the show.
Continue reading for more on Rick and Morgan's conflicting ideologies and what that means for the show, plus Lincoln's thoughts on when The Walking Dead should introduce Negan.
IGN: You mentioned Morgan's return and his conflicting ideology with Rick, so how much is the moral struggle between those two characters going to be pivotal to the show?
Lincoln: It's not just Morgan, as well. One of the interesting things that plays out this season is how, now that we found a place that is potentially a restart, every character has their own breathing space to explore how they feel about how we move forward. You won't necessarily just see one character's position on this in opposition to Rick and his leadership. It will be a lot more as people grow. That's been one of the most exciting things as well is the internal struggle, how people become individuals, There's also characters that have been very associated with other characters throughout the first five years, maybe they start to stand alone and stand on their own two feet, and that's going to cause conflict as well.
So, yes, a lot of the first episode, it's great because Morgan is the eyes of the audience, checking in with where Rick is at. There's a scene in the first episode between the two men where I don't know if Rick would have opened up in that way if it had been anybody but Morgan on the steps when he offers for Morgan to hold Judith, and he asks a couple of questions about one character, Carter. I don't know if any other character could have asked or Rick would have been as open with any other character. There's a shared history, but also these are two men who don't really know each other.
IGN: That's what's so interesting about bringing Morgan in, since he's a character we've seen for seasons but don't really know.
Lincoln: Yeah, and that was wonderful to play. Morgan and Rick are very strong, granite-like, tenacious, independent voices. To have someone like that in the community in opposition to Rick is a very, very interesting dramatic device, and it's been real fun playing with Lennie, who's an awesome actor anyway in his own right, but he's brought so much more this season because he gets to live and play with all the other characters in the community, and how he bounces off them.
IGN: I wanted to ask you about that. What has the experience been like introducing Lennie as recurring as opposed to someone who came in and out in previous seasons?
Lincoln: He's just an incredibly gifted actor, very bright, interesting choices, but also he loves the show. This is a juggernaut. It's like a moving train; you just have to jump on and hold on for dear life. He's been amazing. He's kind of been driving the train, he's such a formidable presence on set. I've loved it. Funny enough, I just saw him in the corridor at the hotel and he's just like, "This is amazing." Because it is wild. The beast of the show, what this show has become, as well; just sort of wrangling all of that on top of the work side of things has been thrilling for him. We're just very, very lucky that we've got him.
IGN: I'm sure between San Diego Comic-Con and the Madison Square Garden premiere he's going to become very aware of just how big it is.
Lincoln: I mean, don't get me wrong, the moment I became a zombie-slayer, my life became epic. It's just every single event now feels almost like an out-of-body experience because they just get bigger and bigger and weirder and weirder. But it's an amazing journey, is what this is. It's an extraordinary journey onscreen and off. We're a tight group of maniacs that make this show. What I'm most thrilled about is we get to celebrate with the crew and the cast all together -- and we're still shooting. It's been a very, very tough season, and it's going to be a great day to celebrate.
Continue onto page 3 for Lincoln's breakdown of some cool experiments The Walking Dead is doing in Season 6, plus why he thinks the show needs Negan.
IGN: We touched on this a little bit earlier, but the one thing I credit The Walking Dead with is that it never rests on its laurels. It always experiments, it always tries something new and different, which it doesn't necessarily have to as it's the biggest show on TV. Is there something stylistically, structurally or thematically different that you guys have done this season that you found particularly interesting?
Lincoln: It's lovely that you've identified that. We have to thank Scott Gimple for his daring. When we entered Alexandria and I shaved, maybe from episode 12 of last season to the end, it felt like a very different show. It was kind of nerve-wracking because we know what we do very, very well, and you could fall into the pattern of just repeating that. This returning episode is not like the returning episode that we did at Terminus. It's completely different. There are stylistic changes visually that are very, very different and something that we never attempted before. There's also an episode in the middle of the first eight that feels like an indie movie in the middle of The Walking Dead, which is so different. In the back eight there's an episode that is tonally very, very different to anything we've attempted before, and I love that.
If ever there was a time to experiment, it's in Season 6. Let