Glenn
AMC
The Walking Dead is about to come to a close with the third part of its eleventh season, but AMC is going to make it live on with a number of spin-offs and anthology series. There are actually going to be more Walking Dead shows airing after the main show dies than before it, which include Fear the Walking Dead, Isle of the Dead (a Maggie-Negan spin-off), Daryl’s European Vacation spin-off and Tales of the Walking Dead, an anthology series.
The show is going to start having some old faces return to the series. Many rumors suggest Rick Grimes will probably show up in some way for the grand Walking Dead finale. Alpha is getting her own anthology episode. And so even though Glenn Rhee died at the hands of Negan years ago, there’s always the chance that he could show up in a dream, vision or flashback.
But turns out no, there is no chance, because Steven Yeun is adamant about never returning to the series. Doing press for Jordan Peele’s Nope, he made that pretty clear on Conan’s podcast:
“Sometimes, you just accept what it is and you go with it. There’s no tension behind it. You’re like, ‘OK.’ I’m not gonna go kicking and screaming. The police voice in my head said, ‘If you do it again, you’re a hack,’ So, I don’t do it again. I cringe [at the thought].”
“Those are the blessings I think I’ve got in my life. An absolute door shut. There’s not like a crack in the door. It is slammed shut, and barricaded.”
This feeds into past times this has been brought up with Yeun, where it seems like he wasn’t thrilled about being killed off when he was in the series at the time. Even though it was something that happened in the comics, it seemed like the show had written him an “out” in the form of Abraham’s death, but they killed him for the shock value anyway. Glenn’s death is frequently cited as a reason many people stopped watching, and ratings of the show never recovered after that point.
There were also past rumors that Yeun did not want to return to appear for things like Rick’s final episode, where he could have shown up as a hallucination, which was reportedly what the writers wanted, but he didn’t want to do it, as he seems to be confirming in his new quotes here.
It’s…hard to blame him, really. Both in terms of the fact that no, he probably never should have been killed off in the first place, but also that Yeun is currently a great actor with fantastic career, with a number of amazing roles to his name across movies like Minari (which got him an Oscar nomination), Burning and now Nope here. I am sure that AMC would love if he came back for some sort of Glenn anthology episode, or showed up in a Maggie dream sequence in the series finale, but again, I do not blame him for staying away, given all that went down, and where he is in his career now.
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