Why The Main Star of The Walking Dead Walked Away

This is Rick Grimes, and he was the focal point and central protagonist of The Walking Dead. The whole story centered around Rick's struggles with keeping his family together through the horrors of a world overrun by zombies. The comic series follows Rick Grimes until almost the very final issue, whereas the television show sees him departing midway through the ninth season. Why did Andrew Lincoln decide to leave The Walking Dead?

It's almost ironic that his motivations for leaving were pretty much directly in line with Rick Grimes's motivations for living. The Walking Dead began its much-anticipated run-on Halloween of 2010. The show is based off of the wildly popular comic book series of the same name, written by Robert Kirkman. The story follows a group of survivors struggling to navigate a zombie apocalypse, while they have their morals and ethics checked at virtually every turn. Before we jump into the reason why Andrew Lincoln decided to step away from his role as the protagonist of one of the most popular television shows in production, it's important to stress the significance of Rick Grimes to the central narrative of The Walking Dead to properly illustrate how impactful his departure actually was.

Rick Grimes is the story. He is the person we are rooting for through the entirety of the series. His entrance into the zombie apocalypse is a worst-case scenario, tension fueled nightmare. Waking up from a coma with absolutely no information about the complete collapse of modern society makes survival highly unlikely, but the fact that he somehow survives is a powerful and efficient tool for getting us on board with a protagonist. When you pair that with the noble and relatable goal of finding your family in a zombie infested hellscape, you have a character who almost anyone on the planet can side with.

The fact that Rick is able to find his family and with them, his old partner, Shane, played by Jon Bernthal, cements The Walking Dead as his story. We know that we will be following Rick, his son, Carl, his wife, Lori, and his infant daughter, Judith, up until their respective ends, whatever that may be. Throughout the rest of the show, Rick and his family are challenged time and time again. Rick's decisions ultimately lead to his family members dying in the most tragic ways imaginable. Lori gets killed early on in the series while the survivors are hiding out in the abandoned prison.

In a departure from the source material, Judith actually survives the governor's attack on the prison and lives on. Showing a baby getting eaten by a zombie was probably a bridge too far even for a show like The Walking Dead. Rick's son Carl Grimes gets bitten by the infected and eventually dies when Negan shows up to attack Alexandria. And it's in Carl's death specifically that the series hits a messy snag that ultimately changes Rick's character forever. With Lori and Carl Grimes dead, Rick's journey becomes significantly less emotionally impactful. In an effort to re-establish his motives, the writers placed Rick into a romantic relationship with one of the original survivors, Michonne.

Despite this move also being another large departure from the source material, the relationship develops into something strong, but it's not nearly as strong as the clearly established father-son bond that had been deepening its roots for nearly eight entire seasons. Judith is the last remaining of Rick's family, but the problem there is that for the majority of the time, Judith Grimes is seen as a baby and seldom seen at that. The unintended effect here is that we haven't really seen Rick and Judith's relationship grow and thrive. So, we're left with a pretty big problem story wise. We have a character who is driven by motives of protecting his family who no longer has a family to protect. One could argue that the survivors are Rick's new family, but that isn't nearly as substantial as a blood bond. Rick Grimes's character arc starts running out of steam pretty quickly in a post-Carl world.

The other issue that was taking place at this time was the fact that Andrew Lincoln's contract with AMC was about to expire. And Andrew Lincoln wasn't necessarily keen to renew it. Lincoln actually asked to be killed off, but the showrunners were able to finagle a deal with him for a three-part Walking Dead film, which has since been scrapped in favor of a spinoff series centered around Rick and Michonne. We'll touch on that a little later on. Something doesn't feel right about the way Rick Grimes was written off the show. And that's likely because it was written with the intent of killing him off entirely.

However, rumors of the showrunners killing Rick Grimes leaked pretty quickly amongst the already rapidly spreading news of Andrew Lincoln's desire to leave the show. The internet was on fire with outrage and speculation prior to the release of Rick's final episode, which was season 9, episode 5. During the episode, Rick spends almost the entire runtime bleeding to death and hallucinating. He gets almost no time to reconnect or reconcile with any of the survivors he's close to, and instead, has some touching conversations with the ghosts of tertiary characters, like Hershel and Sasha. Right when you think it's all over and that Rick has sacrificed himself to save the survivors, Anne, former leader of the scavengers, shows up in a deus ex machina moment and saves him via helicopter.

His story left wildly unfinished in the wake of a pretty grandiose sequence of events, and in a way, it felt like the entire heart of the show itself had been ripped out. As mentioned earlier, Rick Grimes will be returning to The Walking Dead by way of a spinoff series set in the universe AMC has created. The series was announced at Comic-Con in 2022. There are some moments that have happened during the show's tenth season that seem to have links to what could be the spinoff, but aside from that, there haven't been too many other connections. Sometimes when we invest ourselves into a series as heavily as we do with a show like The Walking Dead, we lose sight of the fact that the people who are portraying these characters are living, breathing human beings with lives, families, and career ambitions. We almost take them for granted in a way. We have to keep in mind that Andrew Lincoln had been working on the same project for almost an entire decade.

That's a really long time for literally anyone to be away from their family, especially when you have two children entering crucial stages in their development into their teenage years. So, there's a mirror here between Andrew Lincoln and Rick Grimes. Both of them want what is best for their families. Where Rick lost his family, Andrew was able to realize that he wanted more time with his real family. Many fans have speculated that there was some sort of contract dispute or that Andrew Lincoln left to pursue bigger projects, which is funny to think about because The Walking Dead is one of the biggest television shows in history, drawing millions of viewers for over a decade. It doesn't appear that any of these rumors are true. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions on how much of your family time you're willing to sacrifice for your work. And in Andrew Lincoln's case, it was more important for him to be at home. The Walking Dead moved on quite well without him.

Seasons 10 and 11 have been well received by critics and fans alike. Norman Reedus recently recounted a phone conversation in which he and Andrew Lincoln were discussing how the show had been progressing without Rick Grimes at the forefront of the action. And apparently, Lincoln told him that he believed that he picked the wrong time to leave the show. But aside from that, he has never once stated that he feels like he made the wrong decision. Andrew Lincoln wasn't fired from The Walking Dead. His departure was mostly borne from his desire to be with his family, but it was likely exacerbated by the fact that Rick Grimes just didn't have very much to cling to anymore within the show's established narrative. Without Carl Grimes continuing his development, Rick began stagnating, and like any good actor who has established deep, emotional connections to the character they are portraying, we'll be able to sense that the stagnation is happening. You don't fight.

The point is that when the time comes to make a decision in renewing a contract or moving on to something else, it's ultimately up to what is in the best interest of the performer, and not the best interest of the show they are working on. Sometimes, family just comes first.