“It has a Sliding Doors component, doesn’t it?” Gurira said in a New York Times interview, comparing it to the Gwyneth Paltow romantic comedy that explores two different timelines that spin off of a single decision. She later added: “She [Michonne] was very dislocated from her humanity when she met Andrea, and there was something about Andrea that made her decide to not do what she does in this alternate scenario. It was trippy—in the literal and the storytelling sense.”
In this interview, she has also revealed exactly those flashback scenes that saw her characters in familiar situations from a new point of view were filmed. She said: “All of the stuff where you see Michonne making a different choice, that’s new footage. But they blended old footage with new footage in an impressive way. I was quite amazed.”
This was done by taking previous scenes and re-adding Gurira into them using a mixture of editing and CGI. For example, one moment saw her as the one killing Glenn (Steven Yeun) with Negan’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) bat, which combined new footage of Michonne swinging the bat with what we already saw in the Season 7 premiere.
Asked by The Wrap what her favorite moment of this trip was, she said, “When I saw Michonne and Rick staring eyeball to eyeball, that was very freaky. They did a great job with that.” She said of watching the footage for the first time to The Hollywood Reporter: “Even her reaction to Andrea. That was melded footage. I saw it on a screener, just like you, and I was really freaked by that, just to see her walk away from Andrea. That was my first connection on the show! It’s very indelible inside of me and my character, Michonne’s soul: Andrea. To see her just walk away? That messed me up.”
As to why exactly Gurira is leaving The Walking Dead, she told the LA Times, “I shared…that I felt it was time for me to leave the show to pursue other creative endeavors sometime in 2018. So after last season, when [series lead Lincoln] left, they started to work on that. After that, she started to share with me the architecture of Michonne’s exit. Later on, I was able to contribute to aspects of it.”
Part of her reason for leaving may have been the selection of big projects she has on the pipeline, including an adaptation of the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel Americanah for HBO and, of course, Black Panther II. This was hinted at when she told The Hollywood Reporter: “I felt it was time to give more of myself to other aspects of my journey as an artist.”
Although Gurira has not revealed much about whether she will be back in the Rick Grimes movie spin-offs, as her ending suggests she might, she said to TVLine of the way that Michonne left The Walking Dead, “because of her evolution, she makes the same decision [that she had with Andrea,] to help people, to an extent expressing her humanity to the inconvenience of her own aspirations. That’s the woman that she’s become, and I was happy that that was the woman she got to exit being.”
The Walking Dead airs Sundays on AMC.
