Is Jon Bernthal (Shane) in the upcoming The Walking Dead movies?

The last time we saw Jon Bernthal on The Walking Dead was in the penultimate episode of season 2, “Better Angels,” where his character, Shane, was killed by Rick (Andrew Lincoln) for crimes against the group. He then reanimated as a walker and was quickly put down by Rick’s son, Carl (Chandler Riggs).

Shane is still remembered all these years later as one of the show’s most compelling antagonists. But he’s definitely dead…right? There’s word going around now that the character may be involved in at least one of The Walking Dead movies currently in production, the ones that will focus on what happened to Rick Grimes after he left the show in season 9.

According to a source close to the site We Got This Covered, Bernthal would show up in the movie(s) as part of some kind of flashback scene, which makes sense. Shane has all but been confirmed as the father of Judith Grimes, Rick’s youngest child, and Rick and he were best friends before the whole zombie apocalypse kicked off. It’d be hard to make a movie about what it’s like to be Rick without at least acknowledging the impact Shane has had.

Shane could also be the focus of a fever dream Rick is having while on the mend wherever he ends up. In fact, Shane had already showed up in exactly this manner, when Rick was bleeding out before being rescued by parties yet unknown back in his final Walking Dead episode:

As much as I’m a fan of Jon Bernthal, I’d much rather AMC try and find a new way to have Rick deal with the pain and guilt of leaving his family behind in Alexandria, but we’ll see. At the moment, production on the movies is shut down like everything else in Hollywood is shut down, but sooner or later, we’ll see.

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h/t NME