The Walking Dead To Resurrect Lori Grimes?
Is Sarah Wayne Callis coming back as Lori Grimes for a special episode of The Walking Dead
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While The Walking Dead is scheduled to conclude in late 2022 with a supersized, 24-episode 11th season, the world created by Robert Kirkman doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. Kirkman has already ended the comic’s run, but the stories of the undead in planned to continue in a multitude of mediums, including other television shows, books, and even films. With so much The Walking Dead content on the way, it looks as though the franchise might be looking into its past for some new stories.
In a rumor from an unknown source on We Got This Covered, Sarah Wayne Callies, who played Rick Grimes’ wife Lori, might be returning for at least one episode of a new anthology series, called Tales of the Walking Dead. We Got This Covered theorizes that this blast to the past could show what Lori was up to while Rick was in the hospital, which could also include the beginnings of her relationship with Shane and her trying to raise Carl on her own. Of course, the only problem there would be that Chandler Riggs, who played Carl, is now too old to play that young. But nothing a little recasting or de-aging couldn’t solve.
Lori died back in The Walking Dead’s third season, after an emergency cesarean section in order to deliver her baby, Judith. To ensure that she didn’t return to life, she was shot in the head by Carl. However, Lori would appear throughout the third season, haunting the memories of Rick.
After the season two finale of The Walking Dead, Callies said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying that she used to have fights with the show’s original showrunner Frank Darabont about how her character needed to die. “I argued that it was necessary to kill Lori and I feel very strongly that for all of the other deviations we may have from the comic book, killing Lori does something to Rick that is vital or the story and can’t be done any other way.” Callies continued, “I’ve said from the beginning, not only am I OK with Lori dying but I think she has to,” Callies concluded, “I’ve played this character with an eye toward an end.”
Callies has stayed relatively busy since her death on The Walking Dead. She has appeared in such films as 2014’s Into the Storm, 2015’s Nicolas Cage-starring Pay the Ghost, and 2016’s The Other Side of the Door. She’s also continued with several different television series, returning for 2017’s Prison Break reboot and multiple mini-series, like 2017’s The Long Road Home, and 2019’s Unspeakable, and appearing on Letterkenny. But most notably, Callies has joined the cast of two shows: co-starring with Lost’s Josh Holloway in the USA sci-fi series Colony, and most recently starred on NBC’s Council of Dads, which was canceled after one season.
As previously mentioned, with the television series and comic coming to a close, The Walking Dead will still live on in many different iterations, like a walker unable to stay dead. The sixth season of The Walking Dead spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead premiered on October 11, 2020. AMC also recently debuted The Walking Dead: World Beyond, which will consist of two 10-episode seasons. The show premiered on October 4, 2020.
AMC also previously announced that Andrew Lincoln will star in three films centered around Rick Grimes after he left the show in its ninth season. Rumor is that these films will focus on the Three Rings, a group that sees themselves as the future for humanity. In addition to this, there is also an unnamed Daryl and Carol spinoff on the way, which is planned to air in 2023 after The Walking Dead has concluded.
While it’s not clear when Tales of The Walking Dead will premiere, it seems as though AMC is trying to hold off most of their upcoming projects until after The Walking Dead’s conclusion in 2022. The show is rumored to tell episodic stories about individual characters, both new and old, and the show’s developer, Scott Gimple has given hints about future episodes, including one that could feature the entire plane crash sequence from World Beyond’s pilot episode, and another might see the return of Madison Clark from Fear the Walking Dead.
