Danai Gurira exits 'The Walking Dead'

Danai Gurira

Danai Gurira. Picture: Supplied

Published Jun 9, 2021

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If you’re looking for a show to binge-watch this winter, look no further.

All 10 seasons of the multi-award-winning show, “The Walking Dead” is now available for streaming on Showmax.

Based on Robert Kirkman’s hit comics, “The Walking Dead” is the definitive zombie show, having won 78 awards globally, including Emmys, People’s Choice and Critics Choice awards.

Danai Gurira and Norman Reedus make a dramatic return to their roles as Michonne and Daryl.

Gurira is leaving “The Walking Dead” this season. Her departure from the show was announced last year.

“The Walking Dead” itself will end in season 11, although there are plans for an anthology series, “Tales of The Walking Dead”, and for a Daryl Dixon-Carol Peletier series starring Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride.

Fun facts about Danai Gurira

If you still use Sean Bean in “Game of Thrones” season 1 as your ultimate example of ‘How could they kill our favourite character?’ then you haven’t been watching “The Walking Dead”, where the swarming undead are often far less dangerous than the remaining living.

Michonne has survived eight seasons of “The Walking Dead”: only three other cast members can claim the same or better: Norman Reedus (Daryl), Melissa McBride (Carol) and Lauren Cohan (Maggie).

“I think I have a lot more to smile about. Playing her actually makes me smile more, because I can go home and turn on the faucet and hot water comes out, and there’s food in my fridge, and my car has gas and I know how to get more gas,” Gurira said.

Remember when Michonne told Carl, “I can’t stop you, but you can’t stop me from helping you?”

Gurira has a similar attitude in real life. She’s the founder of LOGpledge.org (Love Our Girls), an awareness-building campaign focused on the plights of women and girls around the globe.

She serves as an ambassador for Bono’s ONE campaign and, in December 2018, she was named a Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women, supporting its mandate of gender equality and women’s rights.

She’s also the co-founder of Almasi Arts, which works to professionalise the dramatic arts industry in Zimbabwe through education, facilitation and collaboration with professional American dramatic artists and artistic institutions.

When her departure from “The Walking Dead” was announced in 2020, it was attributed to her work adapting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel “Americanah” into an HBO Max miniseries, which she would be the showrunner of.

But “Americanah” sadly became another casualty of the pandemic, after first being delayed and then cancelled when Lupita Nyong’o, who was to executive produce and star as Ifemelu, dropped out over the subsequent scheduling conflicts.

She is now working on an exclusive two-year deal to develop, write and produce projects for ABC Studios. “From Zimbabwe to Wakanda to Broadway, there is no one like Danai Gurira,” said Jonnie Davis, president of ABC Studios.

“Born into this world as an African girl, I never understood the absence of voices and people who were similar to me,” Danai told Entertainment Weekly.

She said: “It never made sense to me that I couldn’t see that representation.

“The very massive magnitude of content you get in television and film, and yet there was this almost absolute absence of the stories of women from the continent and of the continent.

“It didn’t make sense and I didn’t accept any ideas as to why it wasn’t there. It just needed to be there.”

Catch Gurira as Michonne for the last time in “The Walking Dead” on Showmax.

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