Shane Is Returning to 'The Walking Dead'
by EG
Jon Bernthal will make a return to The Walking Dead next season, bringing back the character of Shane years after he departed in the show's second season. Bernthal's return is a reversal of a trend that has seen long-time cast members, including Andrew Lincoln and Lauren Cohan, announcing that theu will be leaving the show next season. Read on for details about Shane's return.
With the stage set for original star Andrew Lincoln's departure, The Walking Dead has plans to mark the occasion with another familiar face from the past.
Jon Bernthal will return to the AMC zombie drama for an episode in the upcoming ninth season, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. (AMC declined comment.) The actor played former police officer Shane Walsh in the first two seasons of the show, outlasting the comic book version of his ill-fated character, who didn't survive the first arc of the Robert Kirkman-penned series. In the TV adaptation, Shane died during an altercation with Rick Grimes (Lincoln), his former fellow officer and longtime best friend. Shane returned moments later as a walker, and was swiftly killed permanently by the late Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs).
The exact circumstances of Bernthal's return remain unknown, though the decisiveness of Shane's death rules out a flesh-and-blood return, at least in the present timeline. As The Walking Dead frequently deals in flashbacks (and even the occasional flash-forward), it feels likely that Bernthal will appear in a scene or series of sequences set in the past. However, the drama has also been known to play around with reality, in the form of visions and hallucinatory sequences; it's entirely possible that Shane could return in that context as well.
However it comes about, Shane's return is likely not to last for long. Bernthal's role as a series regular on Netflix's The Punisher, in which he plays Marvel antihero Frank Castle, limits how many episodes he could appear in on Walking Dead, as the standard rule is three.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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