His name is Andrew Lincoln but you probably know him best as Rick Grimes, the steely eyed, frequently blood covered protagonist from The Walking Dead. Actually, let me walk that back a step further. His name is actually Andrew Clutterbuck, but you probably know him as Andrew Lincoln or Rick Grimes because Andrew’s first agent said Clutterbuck made him “sound like a hobbit.”
That’s how Lincoln explained the name change to U.K. newspaper The Guardian in a recent interview. It’s a somewhat unique discussion because The Guardian still sees Lincoln’s career from a very British perspective, remembering him mainly for ’90s television roles on BBC shows like This Life.
You can watch the above clip for a taste of U.K. Lincoln, and it’s very disturbing to hear him with the full British accent and vocabulary. It’s normal to get a little creeped out about the different voice. His family feels the same way about his Southern vernacular, which he holds onto on and off the set so long as he’s in America.
“My wife and children think I’m bananas,” he told the Guardian. “They’re like: ‘Please stop doing that.’ It’s very unsettling for them because they don’t know who they’re talking to.”
Another interesting factoid about Andrew? He doesn’t watch The Walking Dead. In fact, he hasn’t watched anything he’s done in a long time.
“I haven’t watched myself for 15 years, because I don’t enjoy it. There’s a lot of working parts that can change your performance in between you giving it and it going out. I just realized I’d prefer to have my own imagination about what the story is.”
