Norman Reedus isn’t planning to leave The Walking Dead until it ends

Fans of Daryl Dixon have more of the character to look forward to.

With so many changes happening with the cast of The Walking Dead, it’s no surprise that many fans are wondering what will happen to some of their favorite characters who are still left.

The main cast of characters has changed dramatically after Chandler Riggs left in season 8, with his character Carl passing way from a walker bite. Show vets Andrew Lincoln and Lauren Cohan are set to leave following the first half of season 9. Lincoln will be leaving the show for good, while Cohan may return in the future.

The exact fate of Lincoln’s character, Rick Grimes, is not known (though we have our guesses). With Rick having led the show and its extensive cast since the first season, it’ll be interesting to see how the show deals with his loss. So often when lead characters leave, shows struggle to keep up quality and coherency.

But, fans can at least relax a little where Daryl Dixon is concerned. This summer, Reedus revealed he and Lincoln had “made a pact” about when they’d leave the show. Speaking with EW Radio, Reedus said “I think it was like season 3 or 4. We’re like, ‘If you leave, I leave. Right?’ And that was the thing.”

During an interview on the set of The Walking Dead in Georgia with CBR, Reedus offered relief to Walking Dead fans, saying he’s here till the very end.

"You know, I started on Season 1 of the show, and I’d love to bookend it. I put so much effort into this. For me to walk away now would just seem so cowardly. It’s a fight every day, in a million different ways. But it’s a fight that I’ve been invested in. My family’s here, I like my life here. I like riding my motorcycle through the country to work. I’ve been in New York a long, long time, and now every time I go back to New York I just wanna go back to Georgia."

AMC has also announced that they plan to expand the universe of TWD with other series as well as films. Reedus expressed that he might be interested in joining some of these projects in the future, too.

"I just want to tell honest stories. And I think sometimes, this show’s a huge show. The scripts are this long, and you have this many days to shoot them, and it’s work. It’s tough. We shoot scenes on this show in an hour that if you were on a movie would take four days to shoot. You have that luxury on a film … I would like to slow the pace entirely. Don’t rush me; I’d like a tiny script and stretch it out. I think that would be fun and honest. So, yeah, if it was like that."

It’s nice to know that at least one main character that has been around since the beginning will be around until the end.

Granted, this is The Walking Dead and no character is completely safe. We kind of doubt that TWD would kill off Daryl as long as Reedus is willing to stick around. The show would be wise to keep around a few long-time favorites to the very end, with hopefully some kind of happy, if not neutral ending, in the post-apocalyptic world.

Daryl Dixon has always been a fan-favorite, and we hope the show has interesting storylines for him going forward. What do you hope to see happen with his character? Let us know in the comments!