Danai Gurira and The Walking Dead team are “actually chatting” about how they could do a musical

The Walking Dead’s Danai Gurira says she and the team behind the hit zombie franchise are “actually chatting” about how they could do a musical – even though she’s pretty sure everyone is just humoring her showtune-loving self…

“I was just joking around about having a Walking Dead musical on Broadway,” the Michonne actor teases in the new issue of SFX magazine, which hits newsstands on July 10 and features Doctor Who on the cover. “Me and [Scott] Gimple are actually chatting about it, which is ridiculous. 

“He’s just said we don’t have the rights to it. I’m like, ‘Well, let’s talk to [Robert] Kirkman, see what he says to that.’ I mean, we’re really largely just joking around. But stranger things have been done, and I do love the theatre… It’s about, how do you confine it to something? Because it’s just so much story. So it would really be, how do you confine it to a good two-or-three-hour play?”

(Image credit: AMC)

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While she won’t be toe-tapping as she lops off decomposing heads with her katana on stage anytime soon, Gurira can currently be seen in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, the latest spin-off in the long-running horror series. 

Set around the same time as the events of The Walking Dead season 11, it catches up to both Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne since they parted from their Alexandria family in seasons 9 and 10, respectively. Of course, it also sees the apocalypse survivors find one another, after almost ten long years separated – though coming back together isn’t as easy as they might’ve imagined.

Elsewhere in our chat, Lincoln weighed in on the possibility of reprising the role of Rick again later down the line. “This, for me, felt that we could comfortably say that that’s done. That’s a reunion; that’s the perfect iteration of a story that I thought wasn’t gonna happen for a time, and then Danai and Scott both said, ‘We need to reunite, we’ve got to do an epic love story,'” he recalls. “I went, ‘That’s a great idea – and let’s tell the story of the CRM and do what the grown-ups have been doing’ and maybe some filling in, because I love all of that. 

“I’m a bit of a geek for all of the mythology and what’s going on, what’s been happening,” he continues. “So the short answer is never say never. Because if there’s a good enough place to put Rick in, that we haven’t seen before, there are characters out in the universe that I would love to act with again. But it has to be a really, really, really good story.”

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live is streaming on NOW in the UK, and AMC+ in the US. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which features Doctor Who on the cover and is available from Wednesday, July 10. 

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