Walking Dead Actor Says The Show Mirrors Fight Against Oppression

The Walking Dead may not be the most realistic show on television — until everyone happens to be living in a zombie-run apocalyptic world — but one of the show's actors insists that there's plenty of parallels between the AMC hit and real life. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Danai Gurira, who plays Michonne, explained that the unity of the show's characters mirrors the unity of groups coming together in the face of adversity.

"We saw such a powerful way to end the season, I thought, with the pain and then the triumph and the standing up together," Gurira told EW. "It's a very powerful thing when you think you’re in the clutches of oppression or tyranny and actually come together as a people and decide to stop it. And I loved how that echoes through many a thing we've seen — the fight against apartheid, the fight for the civil rights movement."

Season 8's prevailing storyline, which involves the rogue band of survivors coming together to stand up against the oppression (whether or not that involves Negan and his barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat remains to be seen), actually started at the conclusion of season 7. Gurira says that she's proud to be part of the show's efforts to show just how strong unity can be. It's strong enough to take on zombies, at least. She notes that the world today is full of struggles and that the key to facing it is working together, not diving different factions or pitting them against each other.

"There are so many ways you can actually parallel that to when people decide enough is enough," she added. "And they come together in unexpected ways and come up with new ways to move forward and to get rid of the oppression as a unit — the unity. That's what I love about what happened at the end of season 7. And we'll see how that manifests itself in season 8. It really is the power of that unity that I think is really, really compelling and powerful to me."

The show's eighth season may have just started, but Gurira's giving fans some hope that things don't have to be bleak when everyone comes together, whether that's on the show or off it.