First Look at Jadis in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live
Pollyanna McIntosh teases Jadis' return in The Walking Dead Rick and Michonne spinoff.
Rick and Michonne aren't the only ones who live. AMC announced in October that Pollyanna McIntosh, who played Jadis/Anne on The Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond, would be back for The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live. The spinoff reunites not only Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira), but Rick and Jadis, who flew him away from his family aboard a Civic Republic Military helicopter in season 9. World Beyond revealed that Jadis traded Rick to the CRM and rose through its ranks as a warrant officer, serving under its shadowy leader: Major General Beale (Lost's Terry O'Quinn).
"There will be some of the Jadis that you will recognize from World Beyond," McIntosh told EW, which has the first look at Jadis in the new series (below). "She is in the position of Warrant Officer Jadis Stokes. She is still working with the Civic Republic and the Civic Republic Military. So she's a committed follower of the CRM, but people are not just their jobs, and the old Jadis that we got to know and who has tried her best but has lost many times is a big driving undercurrent of where she's coming from."
On World Beyond, the CRM carried out a "tactical military operation" that eliminated more than 97,000 survivors in Omaha and nearly 10,000 survivors of the Campus Colony with a chlorine gas bioweapon. Jadis then targeted the 87,000 survivors of Portland — lives that would be extinguished to preserve "the last light of the world." It would be a mercy killing, according to Jadis, who aimed to eliminate the Alliance communities that had become a drain on the Civic Republic's resources.
It was always the plan for Jadis to land wherever Rick ended up. The Ones Who Live was originally planned as a movie trilogy before being reworked as a six-episode series, with Walking Dead Universe Chief Content Officer Scott M. Gimple serving as creator and showrunner.
"It was always going to be Rick's story with Jadis and Michonne. Certainly, I knew it would be Jadis and Rick. And then of course I figured you've got to have Michonne in there. And because that hadn't happened in World Beyond, I knew that we'd still have this coming. So it was always that," McIntosh said. "But it was a beautiful call from Scott in lockdown saying, 'We're doing that thing, but can you also do this other thing and come to World Beyond?' So it wasn't a question for me when we wrapped World Beyond as to whether we'd be doing The Ones Who Live or not. It was always going to be the plan, because we want to see Rick, right? The question I get asked the most in my life for the last four and a half years is, 'What have you done with Rick?'"
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live premieres February 25 on AMC and AMC+.
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