Andrew Lincoln has been Rick Grimes – the leader of a group of survivors of a zombie plague in Frank Darabont’s at first mesmeric and then mesmerically dull post-apocalyptic series The Walking Dead – for 15 years. Off and on (and in a spin-off) but mostly on. Now, at last, he is free. He’s had a shower, a haircut and – thank God – cleared his throat after a decade and a half of rattling phlegmily through increasingly ropey scripts and pretending to care about his son Carl, and is appearing on stage in The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge theatre, London and on our screens in the fairly bananas thriller Coldwater.
You can see what attracted Lincoln to the part. John is the anti-Grimes. We meet him (once the obligatory opening scene of the character covered in blood and running through some woods is over and we’ve flashed back to “Two months earlier”) fleeing the sight of a man in the playground beating up a woman, so panic-stricken that he leaves one of his two children there and has to go back for her. The family then moves to Scotland for a fresh start, although his high-flyer wife, Fiona (Indira Varma), seems far too intelligent for us to believe that she would countenance this as the answer to his post-playground PTSD and/or be married to a berk.
