The Walking Dead: Why Andrew Lincoln Had Jon Bernthal “Terrified” During the Making of the First Episode

Rick Grimes star Andrew Lincoln left co-star Jon Bernthal, who played police partner Shane Walsh, “terrified” during the making of the Frank Darabont-directed premiere episode of The Walking Dead. The first episode of the series, “Days Gone Bye,” finds Rick and Shane responding to a high-speed pursuit involving multiple armed suspects, with Rick in the driver’s seat. Because Lincoln is British, he wasn’t accustomed to driving in America — and the speedy cop car chase, which required Lincoln to hit the brakes after racing at speeds as high as 70 miles per hour, had Bernthal pleading with Lincoln to slow down.

The story was relayed by Lincoln and Bernthal’s then co-star Sarah Wayne Callies, who played Lori Grimes, in Friday’s episode of Friday Night In with The Morgans, the video chat-based show hosted by The Walking Dead star Jeffrey Dean Morgan and wife Hilarie Burton Morgan.

“Andy Lincoln as most of us know… is one of the most capable people on television. He can do anything, he can speak in any accent, he can make things look easy, he can sweat and still be sexy. I don’t know. It’s tough,” Callies began in a sneak peek look at the new episode of Friday (via Entertainment Weekly). “But the thing he can’t do is drive. So because he’s British and grew up in London, he didn’t have a driver’s license until, like, five minutes before he came to Georgia.”

Callies continued, “There’s that really cool shot where they lay out the spike strip and then they back up the cop car. And I guess when you learn to drive later in life you don’t develop the same instincts. So Andy didn’t know that you have to slow down around a turn, or that when you’re going in reverse you should go slower than when you are going forward. So he went reverse in that shot — honestly, I think it was almost 40 miles an hour. You can see in the shot, Jon Bernthal gets out of the car s—ing himself.”

The actress has “never seen Jon more scared,” she added.

Lincoln reflected on the shootout scene in a 2017 interview with EW, where he confessed to terrifying Bernthal:

“It was on the roadside. It was throwing down the roadblock, and I think Jon Bernthal was terrified because I was driving and he knew that I had only spent three weeks in the country and I was still driving on the left-hand side of the road,” Lincoln recalled. “And I had to break 60 to 70 miles per hour and then put the brakes on. Jon Bernthal is not a man that gets scared often. And after about the third take, he just went, ‘Andy, Andy, please slow down.’”

Joining the Morgans and Callies on the second episode of Friday Night In with The Morgans is former Walking Dead star turned director Michael Cudlitz, who played Abraham Ford on the zombie drama until he was killed off by Morgan’s Negan.

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