It’s hard to imagine Mad Men without Don Draper, Homeland without Carrie Mathison, Game of Thrones without Ned Stark. OK, maybe it’s not too hard to imagine that last one, but it proves that a successful show can exist without its main character. Andrew Lincoln, the “mentally, physically, and emotionally committed” actor who plays Rick Grimes on The Walking Dead, recently said that he can imagine AMC’s zombie series continuing without him, or as he put it, “for the camera to be certainly his story, and then it just shifts off.”
Creator Robert Kirkman agrees.
“No one is safe [on The Walking Dead],” he said at New York Comic-Con. “Hopefully there have been points where you go, ‘Is this it? Is this where Rick dies?’ And he doesn’t. One day, the moment will come where you go, ‘Oh my God, it is!’ It could happen any time between now and 50 years from now. Fifty years, that’s not gonna happen.” (Kirkman will be 88 years old in 2067.)
Rick has narrowly escaped being killed so many times (like when he fought Winslow and didn’t die of tetanus or, y’know, a giant metal spike going through his skull), both on the show and in the comics, that his death seems inevitable at some point. To be fair, death is inevitable for everyone, but it’s extra inevitable for someone living in a zombie- and baseball bat-wielding maniac-filled wasteland. The #RickGrimesDeathWatch (#AGrimeToKill?) is officially on.
The Walking Dead returns for season eight on October 22.
(Via Comic Book)
