In Episode 13 of The Walking Dead Season 11, we meet the Warlord Ian. And that is embodied by “Terminator” star Michael Biehn, who, after a guest appearance in “The Mandalorian”, ended up in the next series hit.
In the new episode of the eleventh and final season of The Walking Dead, we’re about to meet a whole new set of faces. The sadistic ex-CIA agent Toby Carlson, who as the Commonwealth’s executor makes short and cruel work with (suspected) threats, and Jason Butler, known from the Netflix hit “Ozark”, should be particularly important for the further action Harner is played.
Warlord Ian also leaves a lasting impression, leading a closed apartment complex and treating the Commonwealth delegation that visits him with great suspicion (and quite rightly so, as it turns out in the end). And behind this Ian is an even more prominent guest actor: 80s cult star Michael Biehn.
This is Michael Biehn
It’s been a few decades since Michael Biehn’s career peaked, so let’s refresh your memory in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, but Ian in The Walking Dead sounds familiar. Biehn, who is now 65, celebrated his greatest successes in 1980s sci-fi cinema.
He had his breakthrough role as hardened resistance fighter Kyle Reese in the genre classic “Terminator” in 1984. where he traveled back in time to protect Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor from the Killing Machine Arnold Schwarzenegger (a role he also reprised for a dream sequence cameo in Terminator 2, but only appears in the Director’s Cut).
Orion pictures
For “Terminator” director James Cameron, Biehn was in front of the camera in two more masterpieces in the 80s: In the “Alien” sequel “Aliens – The Return” he shot deadly Xenomorphs as Corporal Hicks and in “Abyss – Abyss of Death” he showed his mean side in the face of a slightly different alien encounter.
In the 90s he was one of the star ensembles of the western “Tombstone” and Michael Bay’s action hit “The Rock”. After the turn of the millennium (and a leading role in the wonderfully trashy live-action cutscenes of the video game “Command & Conquer 3: Tiberian Sun”), appearances in B-movies increased. Fittingly, he was also part of the cast of Robert Rodriguez’s tongue-in-cheek B-movie homage Planet Terror. He’s also recently garnered more attention as the fierce mercenary and antagonist Lang in an episode of The Mandalorian Season 2.
Not the first “Terminator” star in “The Walking Dead”
Michael Biehn is the second big “Terminator” star to drop by “The Walking Dead” within a short period of time (there were actually a few other actors from the “Terminator” franchise in the zombie series who there, however, did not play such a major role by a long shot). It was only in episode 19 of season 10 that Robert Patrick, who once menacingly brought the iconic “Terminator 2” villain T-1000 to life, delivered a psychological trill with Aaron (Ross Marquand) and Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) and thus ensured one of the more exciting additional episodes of the season.
We’ll see in the coming weeks whether surprise appearances await us in the rest of “The Walking Dead” Season 11B. Three more episodes appear in the current part of the season every Monday morning on Disney + and ProSieben Fun. This is followed by another hiatus of several months before The Walking Dead wraps up with the final eight episodes of season 11 later in the year.
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