Zombies? Shakespeare? She masters it all

There are different kinds of actors out there – some verbal, some physical. You could call them Streepians and Stallonians.
Then there’s Danai Gurira, now returning to the zombie world. She masters it all.
Nine months ago, TV viewers saw her in the title role of Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” An English king was played by a Black American woman, catching fresh nuance.
And now she’s back to her alternate life. When “Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live” debuts (9 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 25, on AMC), Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his wife Michonne (Gurira, they’re shown here) are desperate to re-unite, despite the hordes of zombies.
“I feel like I’ve been able to let all my cylinders fire,” Gurira said. “I like intensity. I’m a touch of an adrenaline junkie.”
This edition is partly different from previous ones. Gurira calls it an “epic love story”; Scott Gimple, who supervises the “Walking Dead” shows, agrees: It has “two people who are soulmates, but their souls have been a liittle beaten up by the world.”
And it’s still in a fierce, walking-dead universe. “In the first three or four minutes, there is something truly horrific that happens,” Lincoln said, accurately.
Shakespeare gets messy, but not like this. “It’s like diifferent universes,” Gurira said.
Her roots were on the Shakespearean side. Gurira was born in the college town of Grinnell, Iowa, where her parents were a librarian and a science teacher.
When she was 5, they returned to their natiive land, which is now Zimbabwe. As a former British colony, it had schools that emphasized Shakespeare. She continued that emphasis at college (Macalester, in Minnesota) and grad school (New York University).
“The beauty of theater is, it’s on this schedule,” she said. “Your entire day is like devoted to getting ready for that evening.”
And you can focus on details. She spent a month studying “Richard III” with her acting teachers, sometimes “syllable by syllable.”
By comparison, there was the surge of the “Walking Dead” world. “It dropped me in the middle of Georgia …. I could see they were throwing everything in front of the camera. And I just wanted in for that.”
She joined the show for its third season (in 2012) and left midway in the tenth (2019). Lincoln had left a year earlier, his character being whisked away by mysterious forces.
Ever since, people have been trying to get them back together, but the timing wasn’t right. He had his family life in England; she had movies (she’s Okoye, a warrior leader, in Black Panther and other Marvel films) and theater.
Finally, the timing worked out. For six Sundays, Michonne is back. “She’s gone through a lot, (which) made her very closed off,” Gurira said. “She’s opened up again and then, you know, we’ll see what happens.”