Why did Rick leave The Walking Dead? Six years later he got a whole series to come back
Andrew Lincoln announced in 2018 that he was leaving The Walking Dead, and Rick Grimes's last episode as a series regular aired that November, midway through season 9. The reason wasn't money or scripts, and AMC never actually killed the character — the exit was engineered to set up a film trilogy that never got made, before finally becoming the 2024 series The Ones Who Live. Here's the whole chain of events, in Lincoln's own words.
For nine seasons Andrew Lincoln was The Walking Dead, so when word came out of San Diego Comic-Con in July 2018 that he was leaving, it registered as roughly the biggest exit scripted television could offer. His final episode as a regular — season 9's "What Comes After" — aired on 4 November 2018.
The reason had nothing to do with the show. It was a commute problem.
The reason: 4,000 miles of it
Lincoln is British; his wife and two young children lived in England; The Walking Dead filmed in Georgia. He told The Times the schedule had crept from four and a half months a year to eight, plus press on top, leaving him around two and a half months at home annually — his kids attended school in America just to make the maths work. As he put it to Entertainment Weekly in 2018:
His children "become less portable as they get older." His full verdict: it was that simple, and it was time to come home.
Norman Reedus knew before almost anyone. "I knew Andy was going to leave the show months before anybody else did," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2022, adding that once Lincoln explained he was missing his kids growing up in London, there wasn't much to argue with.
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How the show wrote him out — without killing him
"What Comes After" put Rick through the full menu — impaled on rebar, dragging two walker herds away from his people, blowing up the bridge under his own feet — and then revealed he'd survived the blast. Jadis found him on the riverbank and radioed a mysterious helicopter, and Rick was flown off to parts unknown by the CRM, the shadow organisation the wider franchise would spend years unpacking. The show jumped six years forward in the same episode and carried on without him.
The trilogy that never happened
Minutes after the episode aired, AMC announced Rick would return in a trilogy of theatrical films. Then: years of silence, a pandemic, and a franchise restructure. The films were formally scrapped in 2022 and reworked into something smaller and stranger — a six-episode series about Rick and Michonne.
The comeback
- November 2022 — Lincoln and Danai Gurira cameo in the flagship series finale, teasing the story to come.
- 25 February 2024 — The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live premieres on AMC: six episodes of Rick trapped inside the CRM and Michonne coming to get him.
That's six years, almost to the season, between the helicopter and the explanation. Asked by Radio Times in 2024 why he came back at all, Lincoln's answer was practical:
"Because people would stop me in the street and go, 'Where's Rick?'"
For the record: his exit episode was titled "What Comes After". What came after was a cancelled film trilogy, one 30-second cameo, and a six-episode reunion — which, in franchise time, counts as efficient.
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