The Walking Dead star recalls how “intense” Andrew Lincoln was on set

Andrew Lincoln headlined The Walking Dead for its first nine seasons as the gruff and ruthless sheriff with a heart of gold, Rick Grimes. He’ll be appearing in a new series of Walking Dead movies, but we’re not sure whether he’ll show up on the mother series ever again.

Until we find out for sure, we’ll always have the memories. Appearing on Talk Dead to Me, actor Andrew J. West — who played Gareth the cannibal leader of Terminus in seasons 4 and 5 — remembered just how intense Lincoln was on set.

West’s Gareth terrorized Rick Grimes and crew, and let’s face it, being eaten by actual living human beings is almost worse than being consumed by a zombie, so no one shed a tear when Rick finally put an end to Gareth with a machete. Filming that scene in particular left an impression on West, in more ways than one:

"[Andrew Lincoln] is so method. He is, look, he’s the nicest, warmest, most welcoming dude in the world. I love him to death. I had such a great time working with him. He takes his job so seriously and I loved it. But, I will say I probably still have welts on the side of my body from when he was whacking away at me with a rubber machete during the church scene. I think six years later I’m still healing from that. The guy, he’s so committed to what he’s doing and he’s so intense."

Yikes. We all know art is painful, but that sounds ridiculous.

And that’s not the only reason West labelled Lincoln as “intense”; he also revealed the star’s method for getting into any particularly harrowing scene. “He had this sort of like routine he would go through when we would do like a really intense scene to get himself pumped up. It was almost like some sort of bizarre raindance and sort of like grunts and moans and I never even heard his real accent until I went to the wrap party. He’d stay in his accent. We’d go to lunch hour and it would occur to me like an hour in, ‘You’re still talking like Rick talks.’”

You mean like this?

We kid, we kid. Please don’t hit us with a rubber machete.

Speaking of, West didn’t put all the blame — if that’s what we want to call it — on Lincoln. The production staff all but told him to go crazy with it. “When we did that church scene, my death scene. The way they shot that was they gave Andy a machete that was made out of rubber – hard rubber OK? They wrapped my entire body in padding and you know they were like, ‘Look we want this to look really real so just go for it.’ And that was all Andy Lincoln needed. He got the greenlight and he just whaled away on me… I was fine, but it was terrifying to say the least.”

We still don’t know when the Rick Grimes movies are coming out, but hopefully we’ll be able to see see Andrew Lincoln be intense onscreen again before too long.

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h/t CinemaBlend