The Walking Dead: Andrew Lincoln On Saying Farewell

Fans of The Walking Dead have known for months that one of the show's beloved characters isn't making it into Season 7.

The Walking Dead Season 6 concluded with Negan swinging Lucille, his vicious baseball bat, down on a member of Rick Grimes' group of survivors. With The Walking Dead Season 7 premiere just around the corner, now its time to say farewell. That's not an easy thing, according to Andrew Lincoln, the actor who plays Rick.

"It's the greatest television job I've had in my career, and it's also the hardest because you know you're saying farewell," Lincoln says. "It's unique in that way. It's one of the excitements in that it keeps evolving. It has to by definition. We're telling a story, and the story has to move forward."

The Walking Dead fans don't have much longer to wait to find out who it is they're saying farewell to. The Walking Dead Season 7 premieres Oct. 23 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.

Up until this point, our characters have lived through conflicts... Disease, hunger, scores of the undead, tragedy, betrayal, and unthinkable loss. Through this, they've become formidable. Powerful. Unstoppable.

To start Season Seven, that power is taken away. They had found safety and stability. They had created a home. They thought the world was theirs. They thought they knew the world. They were wrong.

The first half of Season Seven sees our group fractured, broken, bereaved, and picking up the pieces while living under the thumb of oppression. Negan will have successfully brought the survivors under his control, brutally convincing them to live under his rules with a deadly and horrific example of what happens if they don't.

Other characters are unaware of what's happened, but have become separated from the group either by incident or choice -- they will learn that they can't escape this new turn of their world, either. This half season is about these characters starting over.

The overall theme of the season is beginning again. The world isn't what they thought it was. It's bigger and it's even more dangerous.