12 Things You Didn’t Know About The Cast Of ‘The Walking Dead’

The much maligned, often loved, and always watched The Walking Dead returns to AMC this Sunday with a very promising season three. The new season will introduce two new characters considered by the graphic novel readers to be the most bad ass characters of the series — The Governor and Michonne — and season three also represents the meat of the novels. Assuming that Glen Mazzara picks up where he left off with the last half of the second season, The Walking Dead MIGHT actually become the show we’ve always wanted it to be, finally displaying the full potential we saw in the pilot of the series.

Before we re-invest ourselves in the series, I thought it’d be fun to get to know the cast members a little better, so here is some fun personal and professional facts about 12 members of The Walking Deadcast.

1. Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes) is married to the daughter of Ian Anderson, who was the lead singer of Jethro Tull. Moreover, Apple Martin — the daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay’s Chris Martin — served as the flower girl at Lincoln’s wedding.

Also, if you’ve seen it in recent years, you’ve probably already realized this, but having not seen it since The Walking Dead premiered, I had completely forgotten that it was Andrew Lincoln who courted Keira Knightley in Love, Actually.

2. Laurie Holden‘s (Andrea) step-father is Michael Anderson, who directed Logan’s Run and Around the World in 80 Days. When she was 10, Laurie Holden played the daughter of Rock Hudson in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.

Many of you may also remember Laurie from The X-Files, where she played Marita Covarrubias, the U.N. informant to Fox Mulder.

3. Many of you probably got your first glimpse of Steven Yeun way back in 2008, in a Best Buy commercial.

Also cool: Yeun can play the guitar and sings incredibly well.

He was also a member of Second City, and if this video is any indication, he was an awesome member.

4. Most people probably recognize Norman Reedus (Daryl) from Boondock Saints. But did you know he started his career as a model for Prada?

He also has a child with supermodel (or former supermodel) Helena Christiensen.

Reedus is also a bad ass with a titanium eye socket, compliments of a terrible car accident in 2005 following an REM concert in which he was thrown through a windshield.

5. IronE Singleton’s (T-Dog) real name is Robert. He gave himself the name IronE to mark the irony of escaping his impoverished upbringing; IronE’s mother died of HIV/AIDs when he was a teenager. Before The Walking Dead, his most recognizable part was in Sandra Bullock’s The Blind Side.

6. Melissa McBride (Carol) was primarily a Georgia-based casting director when she was unexpectedly hired onto The Walking Dead (she has also acted, briefly, in Frank Darabount’s The Mist). McBride was also in three episodes of Dawson’s Creek, as two different characters.

7. Jon Bernthal (Shane) studied theater in Moscow, and was a professional baseball player in Europe. In 2008, he also was in an episode of How I Met Your Mother. He had one line: “Carlos.”

8. Jeffrey DeMunn (Dale) has been in all four of Frank Darabount’s films. He was also in the 1988 horror flick, The Blob.

9. Scott Wilson (Hershel) has had kind of a bad-ass career, which took off with major roles in In the Heat of the Night in 1967 followed by a role as one of the murderers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. He’s had fairly stead work as a character actor ever since. That’s him on the right, from In Cold Blood.

10. David Morrissey who is set to play The Governor in season three, was nominated for a Razzie for his work in Basic Instinct 2. More interestingly, however, is that he’s married to the great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. He’s a longtime British television actor who some of you may recognize from his role in Doctor Who.

11. Pruitt Taylor Vince, who played Otis in a few episodes, always plays twitchy, nervous and disturbed characters (in fact, he beat out the likes of William H. Macy, Ewan McGregor, and Alan Arkin to win the Emmy for outstanding guest star for his role in Murder One in 1995). The reason he often plays these characters is because Vince has nystagmus, a condition which causes a person’s eyes to move involuntarily.

He’s also recently been in an episode of Justified.

12. There’s not very much interesting about Sarah Wayne Callies (Lori), except that ironically considering viewers’ opinion of Lori, Callies’ character on Prison Break was a fan favorite, and she married her college boyfriend at Darthmouth, a martial arts teacher who looks like a total dork.

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