The Walking Dead Rick Grimes Movie Star Doesn’t Expect to Return to the Show

Pollyanna McIntosh, who will reprise her role as Jadis-slash-Anne in The Walking Dead feature film alongside Andrew Lincoln‘s missing Rick Grimes, doesn’t expect to return to the ongoing television series. McIntosh joined as Jadis, leader of the junkyard-based Scavengers, in Season 7 of The Walking Dead and exited alongside Lincoln in Season 9 episode “What Comes After.” There Jadis, real name Anne, was last seen boarding a helicopter belonging to the Civic Republic Military to rescue Rick, who was gravely wounded in a bridge explosion when halting a walker horde. An early teaser trailer for the untitled Walking Dead feature film revealed Rick and Anne were shuttled to Philadelphia, some 150 miles away from Rick’s last sighting in Virginia.

“Where is she, when’s she coming back? She is somewhere else,” McIntosh said during a Q&A session on Instagram. “We will have to see her again, obviously, at this point, right? We have to see her again. Does that mean she’s coming back to the show? I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”

Former Walking Dead showrunner turned chief content officer Scott Gimple, who is fine-tuning the script he penned with series creator Robert Kirkman, long ago confirmed Anne will transition to the feature film side of the franchise when he said Lincoln had exited the television series for good.

“[‘What Comes After’] is the end of Rick Grimes on The Walking Dead,” Gimple said on a November 2018 episode of Talking Dead, where Gimple first announced plans for a feature film extension of the television show, now in its tenth season. “This is not going to be the end of Rick Grimes’ story,” Gimple said, adding “there’s a lot of story to tell.”

Currently planned as a feature film trilogy to be released into theaters, the Walking Dead films will unravel the “vast mythology” behind the Civic Republic Military, or CRM, a shadowy organization linking all three shows set in The Walking Dead Universe.

The first film will answer dangling questions from Seasons 7 and 8 of the television show, bringing answers about the “A” and “B” classification system used to categorize such characters as Rick, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and Anne’s ex-lover Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam).

“We need to know what happened to Rick. There are a lot of other worlds going on,” McIntosh said when teasing the movie during an October convention appearance. “There’s three movies planned, and it would make sense that Jadis-slash-Anne-slash-whatever’s next, would be in the first movie. It’s gonna be a theatrical release, it’s gonna be a big old doo-dah day, which is great.”

Lincoln and McIntosh are so far the only announced stars set for the Walking Dead films. They could be joined by Corey Hawkins, whose Heath has been missing from the show since Season 7, as well as Danai Gurira, whose Michonne exited the show in Season 10 episode “What We Become” to follow a lead on the missing Rick.

A release date for the first Walking Dead feature has not been announced. For all things TWD, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.