Danai Gurira Was 'Amazed' by Sunday's 'The Walking Dead'

Is this real life … or is it just “The Walking Dead”? The parallels are hard to overlook. With its ghost-town cities and post-apocalyptic mood, AMC’s popular zombie thriller is littered with references to the ruinous disease that ended the Time Before (“Clean Hands Protect Lives” reads a cautioning poster we see in Sunday’s episode of the show) that now seem familiar. And while the lead actress Danai Gurira, who plays the katana queen Michonne, didn’t want to trivialize the ongoing coronavirus crisis by connecting it to the dark fantasy of a TV show, she, too, is unsettled.

“There’s nothing quite like facing a pandemic,” Gurira said in a recent interview. “I’ve never experienced anything like this moment in our time on earth, and we’re still in the middle of it, you know? It’s a real moment-by-moment situation, which does relate to our show’s themes — the struggles that people are having, the tragedies, and the ways that we move forward and get through this together, as a society.”

The society we’ve been immersed in on “The Walking Dead” for the past decade is now losing one longtime member. In Sunday’s Season 10 episode, “What We Become,” Michonne takes her leave of the show, almost exactly eight years after her first appearance in the closing moments of Season 2. She was the mysterious hooded figure who rescued an endangered Andrea (Laurie Holden) by slicing through the undead as two docile “walker” pets stood behind her in chains — a startling entrance that signaled the arrival of a fierce warrior.

Over the years, Michonne has become more complex: We’ve seen her vulnerable side, her romantic side, even her maternal side as she became the devoted mother of an adopted daughter, Judith, and her biological son RJ. That human dimension deepens further on Sunday’s show, in a sequence in which a tripping Michonne re-imagines a series of events from her past, suggesting what her life might have been like if she’d joined Team Negan (led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan), before discovering concrete evidence that her former lover, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) was still alive, and out there … somewhere.

Michonne’s exit from “The Walking Dead” will leave her children in the care of Uncle Daryl (Norman Reedus), and could free the character to pursue and maybe eventually reunite with Grimes, whose story will be continuing in planned films. The character’s departure frees Gurira, who’s also an esteemed playwright, to devote more time to her literary career. She’s also the showrunner of HBO Max’s limited-series adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel “Amerikanah.”

“It’s bittersweet,” Gurira said of leaving “The Walking Dead” after all these years. “But it’s time for me to go on other journeys.” During a phone interview, Gurira talked about Michonne’s alternative reality, the need for female leadership to be dramatized, and what she won’t miss about “The Walking Dead.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What did you think about Michonne’s final episode, where we get to see the life she might have led if she’d never helped Andrea?

A: That was new! It has a “Sliding Doors” component, doesn’t it? I never imagined stepping into this alternative reality for the character, going back to the beginning and remembering who she is and how that affects the choices she makes in the present day — right up to her last choice at the end of the episode. It was fascinating, playing those moments of who she could have so easily become. She was very dislocated from her humanity when she met Andrea, and there was something about Andrea that made her decide to not do what she does in this alternate scenario. It was trippy — in the literal and the storytelling sense.

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I think what I’ve enjoyed most about this job is that every year there’s stuff that you’ve never done before. Even back when Rick was gone, and then within the next episode, Michonne had a son. And that’s why I’m finding it hard to leave, because I always knew that year after year, there was going to be something challenging that would stretch me.

They walked me through this last episode long before I got the script. But I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out until today, when I finally saw it. It was chilling to watch. And I don’t even know how they did some of that. I mean, all of the stuff where you see Michonne making a different choice, that’s new footage. But they blended old footage with new footage in an impressive way. I was quite amazed.

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Q: Has there been any movement on the “Walking Dead” movies yet?

A: Who told you anything about me in a movie?

Q: Well, Scott Gimple talked about the possibility of you participating during a podcast …

A: Oh, really? What did he say?

Q: He was talking about the future of the franchise, and how your movie-star quality would be essential for any films.

A: Well, all I’ll say is, I’ve been part of “The Walking Dead” franchise and the Marvel movie franchise, and I’ve been taught to not talk about things. I’m not saying it is or it isn’t happening. But I think it would be very cool to see this world open up in a way that you can do through a movie exploration. There are a lot of stories to tell that you can’t get to when you’re following a certain narrative in a TV show. But there are all these other narratives that are like, “Oh, wouldn’t that be interesting?” It’s extremely exciting.

Q: If she’s not continuing in the franchise films, this episode closes her chapter. And she’s inspired so many people.

A: I think for all the women on our show, there’s been a lot of power. You’ve seen a lot of female characters grow into their power and leadership and their ability to hold their own in whatever circumstances. I don’t know how often you see that. I’m a feminist, and I advocate women’s leadership, and I loved that shaking up society results in unabashed female leadership, at least in our show. We would benefit from further exploring that in the real world. That’s something we have been deprived of, quite honestly.

Michonne was very much someone I had to step up to, especially when she started to grow into herself and step away from her demons. When she became an item with Rick, Michonne was kind of more cool, and Rick was hot. The way she handles and assesses and comes to clarity about things — I’ve always said, she’s smarter than me, she’s faster than me, and she’s stronger than me. So I had to step into her agility and power. I always felt like I could learn from her as a woman, you know?

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Q: When you were first learning how to be Michonne, didn’t you practice her sword moves on your theater colleagues during the production of your play “The Convert”?

A: I was in the basement of the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, and I had a practice sword made of wood. So I would be talking about the language components of the play while learning how to move my body with the sword. It was on my mind all the time. I felt like I needed to become one with … not only with the character, but with how she moves and how her weapon moves in her hand. I create black female characters, and I’d never imagined a woman like this. So I wanted to give her my all, to do her justice. I would practice with the sword during every break, and I would constantly go back to the trainer to learn more. It was never, “Oh, I’m great at this now.” It was a constant learning curve.

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Q: You’re about to face another learning curve as a first-time showrunner. What lessons will you take from “The Walking Dead” — any dos or don’ts?

A: One of my goals is to show love and respect for the behind-the-scenes crew that most people don’t get to see. Everyone’s job on a show is so, so important. And I saw that attitude in action on “The Walking Dead.”

What do I not want? I don’t want to do a tick check every night. I don’t miss the ticks. Or the Georgia heat. It’s such an important component of the show, to be in that environment, but we were literally sweating buckets and running through woods covered in gnats. There were times where it would be so hot, you’d be like, “Am I about to faint?” They were a little concerned, because I had been exerting myself, I was panting a little, and I had a new wig. But honestly, the heat of Georgia was a character in the show. There was nothing convenient about the world that those characters are in, you know?

Q: The dire circumstances are somewhat metaphorical.

A: The show is metaphorically so many things — the situations that these characters are going through and the way their lives can be completely altered by things unforeseen. That’s something that definitely resonated for me. I created a play called “Eclipsed,” about Liberian women in a war zone, and all the things that happen to women in war zones — how it affected them and their humanity and how they couldn’t predict who they were going to become. And I started to connect it to “The Walking Dead” in the sense that Michonne felt like a woman in a war zone, and it raised the same question: Who did she have to become? It’s about the choices you make in dire circumstances, when your humanity is tested and you have to fight for it. That’s the core of the show — the fight for your soul. It definitely resonates with the myriad unimaginable things that happen to human beings.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .