Tales of the Walking Dead brings in Terry Crews and more for "harrowing, hilarious, heartfelt" stories

The Walking Dead
(Image credit: AMC)

The first Tales of the Walking Dead cast announcements are here, with some high-profile actors set to try their hand at zombie survival.

AMC announced the casting details for the anthology spinoff series in a press release that also laid out the directors for all six episodes of the first season. Leading the cast is Terry Crews of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Old Spice commercial fame, as well as Parker Posey (Lost in Space), Anthony Edwards (Inventing Anna), Poppy Liu (Dead Ringers), and Jillian Bell (Rough Night).

The full set of directors for the series is Haifaa al-Mansour (Motherland), Deborah Kampmeier (Star Trek: Picard), and Tara Nicole Weyr (The Wilds), each of whom will head up one episode, with series producer Michael Strazemis adding on to his previous directing work on The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead by leading the other three Tales episodes.

"Anthony, Jillian, Terry, Parker, and Poppy are the first wave of singular talents who will further expand the Walking Dead Universe into harrowing, hilarious, heartfelt, and horrifying new realms and we couldn’t be happier to welcome them to the family, along with these terrific directors," executive producer Scott M. Gimple said in the release.

Showrunner Channing Powell teased that Tales of the Walking dead will bring in "unique, interesting, and unexpected characters for both old and new TWD fans." A previous announcement hinted that the series will also bring back some familiar faces from the Walking Dead universe, so we'll have to wait and see who else may return for a standalone tale.

Another familiar character from a different corner of The Walking Dead is set to return, with the Telltale Series' Clementine receiving her first solo comic book in June.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.