‘I Would Quite Often Wake Up Shouting’ The Walking Dead Star Reveals the Harsh Reality of Working on the Hit Zombie Series

rick and morgan the walking dead

Regardless of how some may feel about the show's narrative towards its end, AMC's The Walking Dead featured some of television's best and most complex characters. Not only did The Walking Dead showcase how people could survive in a post-apocalyptic world on a human level, but it also shone a light on how relationships could be formed during its tragic events, as well as sadly severed.

Despite the show ending in November 2022, with season 12 never materializing due to declining viewership, The Walking Dead's beloved characters still live on in the franchise as it continues with spin-offs like Dead City and Daryl Dixon. Even though many fans ended up switching off their TVs after the series' Season 7 premiere in 2016 due to the outrage following Glenn's death, the series has fought hard to regain the viewership and respect it once had. This can be seen in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, which revealed where Rick had been since Jadis snatched him away in a helicopter, making it the highest-rated The Walking Dead series of the lot. However, due to its hard-hitting themes and emotional turmoil, some of the show's actors can end up taking home the trauma their characters have sustained throughout the shooting process, and that's actually what happened to Lennie James, who plays Morgan.

The Walking Dead’s Morgan Suffered Terrible Night Terrors Due To Working on the Series

fear the walking dead tv show

In an interview with The Guardian, 59-year-old south London actor Lennie James revealed how much playing the role of Morgan on AMC's The Walking Dead and its spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, impacted him in real life. When asked if he had learned anything about survival from starring in the franchise, James said CBD oil has been a lifesaver for him due to vivid dreams and night terrors from being in The Walking Dead, so the oil would be his go-to survival method now.

"One of the byproducts of being in the zombie world for as long as I was, was that I started having very vivid and lucid dreams. I would quite often wake up shouting in the midst of a night terror, waking the house and making it difficult for my wife to sleep next to me. Someone suggested CBD oil, and it works. So I’d take that into a dystopia."

It's not surprising that Morgan felt the impact of his time in The Walking Dead as his character went through huge emotional and psychological trauma that not only came from trying to survive in the zombie apocalypse but also stemmed from the loss of his wife and son, Duane, at the very beginning. Fans saw how Morgan's mental health declined when Rick and Michonne came across an abandoned trap-filled town that saw Morgan "clearing", a process where he kills both the living and the dead to atone for his previous "failures" in protecting his wife and son.

morgan jones the walking dead

Nowadays, Lennie James couldn't be further away from the zombie-fuelled world as he stars in a radically different role as Barrington, a BBC adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman, which is about a closeted Windrush-generation Caribbean man in a secret relationship with his best friend.