Laurie Holden’s Andrea on ‘The Walking Dead’ was more important than you remember.

The Walking Dead might have been a series about zombies, but it was the living human characters that kept us coming back week after week. We were invested in their lives and their survival. (And we still are, as evident by the success of spin-offs such as The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.) Just how would Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and company get out of the latest walker attack or escape the newest evil human villain? As favorite characters died and newer, more bland ones came in, audiences tuned out. These characters couldn’t compare to the ones we’d spent the first several seasons caring so much for.

We didn’t love every single character in those early years though. Rick, Michonne (Danai Gurira), Glenn (Steven Yeun), and Daryl (Norman Reedus) might have been wildly popular, but a certain member of their group was hated by fans. Frankly, we couldn’t stand Andrea (Laurie Holden). Sadly, it shouldn’t have been that way. She was meant to be a completely different character before being wildly changed into someone that couldn’t be fixed.

‘The Walking Dead’s Andrea Started Strong

Andrea was a liked character when she first showed up on The Walking Dead. While she wasn’t in the first episode, she showed up in the second, “Guts,” and became a core member of the group. Andrea might have been portrayed as an attractive blonde, but she was no stereotype. She was highly intelligent, working as a civil rights lawyer before the outbreak. She wasn’t just smart, but she was also tough. She’d be right there on the front lines, gun in hand, never failing to get messy and take risks fighting the walkers.

Andrea had a good soul, which was shown often. She loved her younger sister, Amy (Emma Bell), and our hearts broke with hers when Amy turned and Andrea had to be the one to put her out of her misery. Then there was her relationship with Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn). They had a sweet friendship, but it’s also where Andrea’s character started to alter significantly from Robert Kirkman‘s comics. Andrea and Dale had a different relationship on paper than what we got onscreen. That change would lead Andrea down a road she couldn’t return from.

In Season 2 of The Walking Dead, Andrea has more edge. That’s understandable. She has just lost her sister and a zombie apocalypse is no time to be smiling and bubbly. She starts to separate from the group and believes more in Shane (Jon Bernthal) than Rick. Andrea becomes a bit of a jerk, spending a lot of time alone. Come Season 3, a walker attack leaves Andrea truly on her own, but not on purpose, as she is accidentally separated from everyone else. It’s here that we first meet Michonne, who rescues her. After that is when Andrea’s character really went off the rails.

Andrea Shouldn’t Have Dated The Governor

In Season 3, Andrea was put in the worst possible romantic angle, when she hooks up with the evil Governor (David Morrissey). You didn’t have to read the comics to know that he’s bad news, it’s just obvious in his actions. Andrea couldn’t see it though, which frustrated fans. While every other Walking Dead favorite was growing, Andrea was regressing. The smart warrior was now a self-centered jerk. She had been reduced to a pathetic love story when she could have been so much more. Eventually, Andrea realizes the Governor is bad and fights against him, but it is too late. Her character couldn’t be redeemed. Instead, Andrea had to die. By the end of the season, she’s bitten and shoots herself. No one watching on their TVs mourned her. Instead, there was relief that her annoying character was finally gone.

Andrea Was Very Different in ‘The Walking Dead’ Comics

The frustration of the failed direction of Andrea’s character grows much worse for those who read The Walking Dead comics. She starts off the same as she did in the TV series, as a smart and resourceful woman with a sister named Amy who will tragically die. Her relationship with Dale, however, is different. In the comics, their relationship turns sexual and they become a couple. They even adopt two orphaned boys, becoming a different kind of family in this new world. Happiness doesn’t last long for Andrea though, as Dale and the kids will die, leaving Andrea alone.

Here is where Andrea’s character vastly differs from what she would become on TV. Andrea doesn’t go against her portrayal and shack up with the Governor. That wouldn’t make sense. Instead, it’s Rick Grimes who she falls for. In the TV series, it’s Michonne who takes this role, but in the comics, it’s Andrea’s journey. She becomes so close to Rick that she marries him, taking the name Andrea Grimes, and becomes a mother for his son, Carl. She is one of the most important characters in the comics, and not one who dies early on either. Andrea made it all the way to Issue #167, where after she is bitten and comes back from the dead to attack her husband, a grieving Rick must stab her in the head. Here, her death is heartbreaking rather than a relief. It might be a comic, but there’s so much emotion to it and true loss. In the TV series, Andrea’s death was an admittance that her character had been too messed up to continue on.

It didn’t have to be that way. It’s understandable that there would need to be differences between the comic and the TV series of The Walking Dead. Some of those work tremendously. For example, Reedus’ Daryl doesn’t even exist in the comics, but try to imagine the show without him. It’s impossible. Changing Andrea so drastically, taking her story away from her and turning her into someone so unlikable, was a bad move. Luckily, Michonne was perfect in Andrea’s lost role, but for Andrea herself, such a badly written change was a death sentence.

Laurie Holden Doesn’t Like Her Character’s Arc

Laurie Holden hasn’t been shy about giving her opinion on Andrea. Back in a 2013 interview, she spoke about the fan backlash against her “extreme” character change, saying, “Now, it was never supposed to, it is what Season 3 is all about, but I did not expect or anticipate such incredible backlash. That’s been upsetting at times.” Holden also understood Andrea’s change, talking about her “bratty behavior” over the grief and anger she was understandably going through. “I think that because the storytelling has gone the way it has at times it has made Andrea look like an idiot, and she’s not,” Holden said. To her, Andrea’s biggest flaw came down to her bad choice in men. “She’s the girl that you want to shake and say, ‘Why are you with that douchebag?’ That’s Andrea.”

While that may be so, the big reason why fans of the comic disliked Andrea so much is because it shouldn’t have been her. Maybe she didn’t have to stay like that comic character exactly, but to change her so completely was frustrating. The Walking Dead show runners completely forgot about how much we cared about her before we’d even met her. That extreme change wasn’t lost on Laurie Holden. In 2017, during the Walker Stalker Convention she didn’t hold back on her feelings for her latter storylines, saying:

“I think the departure from book Andrea to the screen was a mistake… I think the whole stuff that they wrote about Andrea and the Governor was complete and utter nonsense… I think that there was so much beautiful narrative that was lost and that she should have been there a long time, and been the leader that [Robert] Kirkman created in the comic book.”

Laurie Holden saw where Andrea went wrong. It’s just a shame that The Walking Dead series couldn’t have seen it as well. Fans, Laurie Holden, and Andrea all deserved better than what we got.