Andrew Lincoln explains why “The Ones Who Live” is ultimately a love story

Can love conquer all? We’ll find out soon enough.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps, but absence also kind of sucks. Especially if your name is Rick or Michonne. The two post-apocalyptic lovebirds were separated back in season 9 of The Walking Dead when Rick (Andrew Lincoln) was airlifted in a helicopter away from an exploding bridge. A season later, his wife Michonne (Danai Gurira) left on a quest to go locate her husband. That quest will now be followed on the latest Waking Dead spinoff series, The Ones Who Live (premiering Feb. 25 on AMC).

While The Ones Who Live will feature many things familiar to fans of The Walking Dead franchise — lots of action, lots of zombies,  lots of villains — it will also feature something else… lots of love! Lincoln, who also serves as a hands-on executive producer on the series, says it was his fellow EPs Gurira and Scott M. Gimple who came up with the idea to focus in on the romantic connection between the pair of warriors.

Gene Page/AMC Danai Gurira as Michonne and Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes on ‘The Walking Dead’

“We had been trying to find a way and were like ‘What is the story we want to tell?’” Lincoln explains. “And then it was Dania and Scott that really talked me into it. They just said, ‘Look, why don’t we just tell a love story? Why don’t we see if we can reconnect these two lovers from these weirdly disparate time zones and tell a bigger story about what the grown-ups have been doing while we’ve been scrambling around in the main series, and shade in a bit of that.’”

And what was Lincoln’s reaction to their pitch? “’Okay, let’s do it. Let’s tell a love story.’ And I suppose that’s the story that we keyed into: Can their love survive the time and distance apart?”

For Gurira, focusing on the love bond between the two lead characters was a pretty dramatic shift for the franchise. “There are times where that’s not the muscle of The Walking Dead,” explains Gurira. “The Walking Dead’s muscle is very different from love stories. They manage to sneak their way into the main thrust, which was usually: We’re dealing with an enemy. We’re trying to stay alive. We’re trying to thrive. We’re trying to keep a community going. Those were the large themes of The Walking Dead. Love stories tend to be a teeny bit peripheral. So the idea of making a love story actually the thrust and the drive of a series was a new muscle.”

Gene Page/AMC Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes and Danai Gurira as Michonne on ‘The Walking Dead’

And Gurira tasked herself with making sure the show remained true to that vision. “I was the biggest advocate around making sure that we stayed on that track, so I had opinions on how love stories work and how they don’t. That was a big important part of it for me as I’m probably the one who’s also watched more love stories than my two co-creators.”

For one of those co-creators, the concepts of love and survival actually go hand in hand. “It’s an epic love story,” Gimple says of The Ones Who Live. “But it’s a survival story too, because here’s a wild question: Would Rick Grimes have survived coming out of the hospital if he didn’t have a wife and a kid? I’m not sure he would have. What drove him was his love. And Michonne was living like a walker because she had lost her family.”

Gene Page/AMC Danai Gurira as Michonne and Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes on ‘The Walking Dead’

What brought her back, notes Gimple, was love from a new group of family and friends, which he says serves as “fuel for the engine that makes them able to survive this horrific world and even build it into a non-horrific world. They need to find each other to survive and to have that power.”

And what kind of power is that? As a wise philosopher named Huey Lewis once opined, that’s the power of love! But perhaps the tonal shift in the latest Walking Dead series serves not just the characters on the screen, but the viewers watching as well. Surmises Lincoln, “I think the world needs a love story right now.”

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