'The Walking Dead's Chandler Riggs Was Confused Over How Carl Aged

If you were a little bit confused by the rate at which Carl Grimes aged relative to the rest of the cast of AMC's The Walking Dead, you aren't the only one.

Carl, played by actor Chandler Riggs, began the series as a ten-year-old boy, but (as ten-year-olds are wont to do) aged pretty noticeably from year to year. This became a little distracting when The Walking Dead was in the habit of having cliffhangers where the characters would be in the same place for the premiere six months after the finale left them there.

"How old am I?" Muses Riggs (sometimes in character as Carl, sometimes not) in a new video from Screen Junkies. "I aged like 7 years in about 2 years of zombie apocalypse time and at a much faster rate with my sister. Do I have a mutation of the zombie virus that causes me to age much quicker? I'm going to look liker Hershel when I'm thirty."

There are a lot of other questions, some of which are very Carl-centric and some of which -- like why does Negan continue to wear a leather jacket in humid Georgia weather -- are less so, but still equally compelling.

Riggs was surprised last season to find out that the long-running AMC series was set to kill Carl off, stripping away another layer of similarity between the show and its comic book source material and continuing to keep audiences off-guard as to what they can expect coming up.

In the comics, which are well beyond the point in the story where AMC's upcoming ninth season of The Walking Dead takes place, Carl remains a major character, along with his father Rick, who will be departing the show when series star Andrew Lincoln moves on in the first half of the season.

Rick's fate is unknown, as cast and producers have been reluctant to commit to whether Rick will die or simply leave. The latter would presumably provide the possibility of Lincoln returning for an eventual season finale, although dream sequences, flashbacks, and hallucinations have happened in the past to allow for dead characters to make brief returns.

The Walking Dead returns to AMC in October.