Summary
Regardless of how some may feel about the show’s narrative towards its end, AMC’sThe Walking Deadfeatured some of television’s best and most complex characters. Not only didThe Walking Deadshowcase how people could survive in a post-apocalyptic world on a human level, but it also shone a light on how relationships could be formed during its tragic events, as well as sadly severed.
Despite the show ending in November 2022, withseason 12 never materializing due to declining viewership,The Walking Dead’s beloved characters still live on in the franchise as it continues with spin-offs likeDead City andDaryl Dixon.Even though many fans ended up switching off their TVs after the series’Season 7 premiere in 2016 due to the outrage following Glenn’s death, the series has fought hard to regain the viewership and respect it once had. This can be seen inThe Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, which revealed where Rick had been since Jadis snatched him away in a helicopter, making it the highest-ratedThe Walking Deadseries of the lot. However, due to its hard-hitting themes and emotional turmoil, some of the show’s actors can end up taking home the trauma their characters have sustained throughout the shooting process, and that’s actually what happened to Lennie James, who plays Morgan.
In an interview withThe Guardian, 59-year-old south London actor Lennie James revealed how much playing the role of Morgan onAMC’sThe Walking Deadand its spinoff,Fear the Walking Dead, impacted him in real life. When asked if he had learned anything about survival from starring in the franchise, James said CBD oil has been a lifesaver for him due to vivid dreams and night terrors from being inThe Walking Dead, so the oil would be his go-to survival method now.
“One of the byproducts of being in the zombie world for as long as I was, was that I started having very vivid and lucid dreams. I would quite often wake up shouting in the midst of a night terror, waking the house and making it difficult for my wife to sleep next to me. Someone suggested CBD oil, and it works. So I’d take that into a dystopia.”
It’s not surprising that Morgan felt the impact of his time inThe Walking Deadas his character went through huge emotional and psychological trauma that not only came from trying to survive in the zombie apocalypse but also stemmed from the loss of his wife and son, Duane, at the very beginning. Fans saw how Morgan’s mental health declined whenRick and Michonnecame across an abandoned trap-filled town that saw Morgan “clearing”, a process where he kills both the living and the dead to atone for his previous “failures” in protecting his wife and son.
Nowadays, Lennie James couldn’t be further away from the zombie-fuelled world as he stars in a radically different role as Barrington, a BBC adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novelMr Loverman, which is about a closeted Windrush-generation Caribbean man in a secret relationship with his best friend.
