The Walking Dead Star Reveals the Truth About Jadis and Rick Grimes

Is Jadis friend or foe to Rick Grimes? After a Civic Republic Military helicopter airlifts Anne/Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) and a gravely-injured Rick (Andrew Lincoln) away from The Walking Dead, the chopper shuttles Rick to safety at a new location: the Civic Republic. But Jadis trades Rick to the CRM as her ticket into the CR — a post-apocalyptic Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — spending six years inside its authoritarian military. Landing on the final season of The Walking Dead: World Beyond as a Warrant Officer for the CRM, Jadis tells Huck (Annet Mahendru) she branded Rick a “B” to spare him from a fate as a Test Subject for Project Votus. 

Jadis rescues Rick in the Season 9 episode “What Comes After,” requesting a life-saving medevac after Rick blows himself up saving his friends and family from a zombie horde. “I’m trying to save a friend,” Jadis radios the CRM copter. “A friend who saved me.” 

Was Rick a friend — or just Jadis’ ticket into the Civic Republic? 

“Can it not be both? She spent a lot of time with Rick, she has a lot of respect, she had a lot of care for him,” McIntosh said on Talking Dead following Sunday’s series finale of The Walking Dead: World Beyond. “I feel it was a genuine response to his situation, and then, ‘How am I going to save him? How am I gonna get him on [the helicopter]? I’m going to say this, this is how it’s going to work.’”

After Rick ends the war with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and invites Anne/Jadis to join Alexandria, the former leader of the Scavengers is the suspected killer of missing Saviors turning up dead. Jadis asks Father Gabriel Stokes (Seth Gilliam) to run away with her to the Civic Republic but flees alone before she comes across Rick and disappears with him aboard a CRM helicopter. 

“I don’t think she was thinking as far ahead as getting into the CRM. I think she was thinking of getting out of [Virginia], getting to a safer place, and getting him to a safer place,” McIntosh said. “And then, like Jadis does, from that point forward, she has to keep doing what’s right in her worldview.” 

Jadis tells Huck she gave the CRM “something very valuable,” later calling Rick a “resource” and “someone special.”

“I think you can take it in your own way and imagine what you would want Rick to have gone through or done, or reacted or however, in this world that Jadis is talking about,” McIntosh previously told ComicBook about the Rick Grimes intel revealed on World Beyond. “But I like that they put in that line about him being very valuable because Jadis did care about Rick, and respected the hell out of him, and appreciated what he’d done for her. So, yeah, when she says ‘valuable,’ she doesn’t just mean to the CRM.” 

McIntosh and Lincoln will reunite in the untitled Walking Dead Movie set after their fateful helicopter flight touches down in the Civic Republic. 

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