Norman Reedus hitches a ‘Ride’
After six seasons of the AMC hit “The Walking Dead,” Norman Reedus could be forgiven if he needed a break from the grim, viscera-splattered world of his motorcycleriding, zombie-slaying alter-ego, Daryl Dixon.
Except Daryl remains a strong presence in “Ride With Norman Reedus,” the new motorcycle road trip styled unscripted series starring Reedus that premieres Sunday night on AMC. There’s Reedus with friend and fellow actor Balthazar Getty being genuinely impressed by a zombie-themed burlesque show in Las Vegas in one episode, and there he is meeting and greeting a small crowd of fans between twists through a North Carolina highway in another. “Anybody ever tell you you look like Daryl from ‘The Walking Dead’?” one asks.
It’s a clear tonal shift from the corpse-riddled end times of Reedus’ day job, but fame — and the role that helped bring it to him — is never far away.
“Yeah, I’m not mad at it,” Reedus said, dressed in a dark blazer and henley in a hotel room on a hazy spring day in Beverly Hills, Calif. “I like having fan interaction, and I like feeling like it’s our show — fans included. You know, it’s part of (fame) and part of what I’ve embraced with it. It gives you strength to keep pushing forward.”
That momentum is also
“I do some of my best thinking with a helmet on.” — Norman Reedus
a big part of “Ride,” which allows him to indulge a longtime passion for motorcycles. He got into scrapes on a friend’s dirt bike when he was 13 years old, and his first real job when he moved to Los Angeles was working at the since-closed Venice bike shop Dr. Carl’s Hog Hospital.
“I do some of my best thinking with a helmet on,” said Reedus, who compared the riding experience to yoga.
“There is nobody more passionate about motorcycles than Norman Reedus,” said Joel Stillerman, AMC’s president of original programming and the man who proposed the idea for the show.
Reedus said yes “before (Stillerman) changed his mind.”
“He’s so easygoing and up for an adventure,” Getty said of Reedus. “There’s something very youthful about him, and we’re both big kids.” The show attempts to reflect that sensibility with a loose, just hanging-out structure that recalls many travel-tilted programs on basic cable. The first season of “Ride” encompasses six geographic-specific, one-hour episodes with Reedus’ voice-over and in-helmet microphones narrating the experience alongside stopovers.
For the past seven years, Reedus, who now lives in New York City, has also kept a home in Georgia near where “The Walking Dead” shoots. For all of his fondness for big-city energy that he references on “Ride,” he now finds a lot to like in the more wide-open spaces.
“I wake up in the morning and shoot a compound bow at trees, have a cup of coffee and go to work,” he said. “Which I think is a felony in New York.”