‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Star Cast As The Cowardly Lion In ‘Wicked’ Sequel

The Cowardly Lion

Credit: Warner Bros

A Fear The Walking Dead star has been cast as the Cowardly Lion in Wicked: For Good and he’s a pretty perfect choice. The sequel to 2024’s smash hit musical Wicked is only a month away from its November 20th theatrical release, so it’s a little surprising to still be getting casting announcements so late in the game.

It turns out, award-winning actor Colman Domingo will play Dorothy’s furry, courage-challenged companion. The original Cowardly Lion was played by Bert Lahr. Domingo played the morally flexible Victor Strand on the The Walking Dead spinoff for all eight of its seasons, appearing in more episodes than any other actor in the zombie series. The actor even took his turn in the director’s chair on the series.

Fear The Walking Dead Didn’t Deserve Colman Domingo

Unfortunately, Fear The Walking Dead was mostly quite terrible after a remarkably good third season. When new showrunners took over and completely changed the nature of the series, which went from gritty to goofy overnight, it devolved into one inane plotline after another. I reviewed the show for all eight of its seasons, often in awe at the sheer absurdity of the scripts.

Domingo is a terrific actor, and I’m still amazed he stuck around for the whole show even as countless other talented cast members abandoned ship, including Frank Dillane and Garret Dillahunt.

Fear The Walking Dead’s writers came up with many of the most preposterous storylines in the entire Walking Dead franchise, from daring rescues on beer bottle-shaped hot-air balloons, to a villain group where everyone was named after birds, not to mention some of the clunkiest dialogue ever written.

The series also starred Alycia Debnam-Carey as Alicia Clark, Kim Dickens as Madison Clark, Ruben Blades as Daniel Salazar and original TWD star Lennie James as Morgan “I have to make up for all the bad stuff I’ve done” Jones. A rotating cast of guest stars cycled through as the seasons progressed, including several other Deadwood alumni (a show both Dickens and Dillahunt starred in) including Keith Carradine, Dayton Callie and Ray McKinnon.

Like others in the Fear The Walking Dead cast, Domingo has gone on to do bigger and better things, including the award-winning films Sing Sing and Rustin and shows like The Four Seasons and The Madness among others. He’s been nominated two Academy Awards and two Tony Awards.

Colman Domingo As The Cowardly Lion

The Wicked films are based on the Broadway musical of the same name, which is in turn based on the novels by Gregory Maguire, which were inspired by the movie The Wizard of Oz, which is itself based on the books by L. Frank Baum. It’s a yellow-brick road of inspiration and iteration that’s somehow managed to be quite good from start to finish.

The Broadway musical has music and lyrics written by Stephen Schwartz and a book written by Winnie Holzman. There are numerous changes from the novels but the primary change is a focus on the friendship between Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo in the movie) and Glinda (played by Ariana Grande in the movie). The endings of the two are also radically different.

The entire Wizard Of Oz lineage is worth your time. Baum’s novels are classic American fantasies that served as allegorical arguments for the Gold Standard (follow the Yellow Brick Road!) and the original film remains one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever made, introducing awestruck audiences to movies with color. (On my visit to Washington, D.C. last year I saw the original Ruby Slippers at the National Museum of American History and was genuinely moved. Days later I saw Wicked on Broadway).

Maguire’s books are a dark take on the story that add new layers of political and cultural commentary. And the Broadway show (which I’ve seen both on and off Broadway) is tremendous. The first Wicked film is one of the best adaptations of a Broadway musical ever made, though splitting it into two movies has proven controversial.

In Wicked, Dorothy is not the hero but rather a pawn of the Wizard, a diabolical villain who uses the “othering” of Animals (intelligent, talking animals) to divide the populace and create a useful enemy to fear (something we see happen to various groups in our own society with shameful regularity). The Wizard’s thirst for power is coupled with his lack of any actual magical powers, something the story’s true hero – Elphaba, who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West – possesses in spades.

The Cowardly Lion is one such Animal, though he accompanies Dorothy in her quest to defeat the Wicked Witch and bring the Wizard her magical, flying broom. You can spot Dorothy, the Tin Man, The Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion in the trailer below around the 1:50 mark:

Recall the lion cub that Elphaba and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) saved from a cage in the first Wicked film. This cub goes on to become the Cowardly Lion, and the Wizard and his cronies, including the Tin Man, blame Elphaba for his cowardice. There’s a line in the song “March of the Witch Hunters” in which the Tin Man sings:

And the lion also / Has a grievance to repay / If she’d let him fight his own battles / When he was young / He wouldn’t be a coward today!

Blaming his rescuers for his cowardice is quite loathsome, of course. It’s much more likely that being tormented and caged as an infant created the Lion’s trauma.

In Maguire’s series, the third novel is titled A Lion Among Men and is told from the perspective of the Cowardly Lion. It’s set roughly eight years after the second book, Son of a Witch, which centers on Elphaba’s son, Liir, over a period of about a decade following the events of Wicked, which ends very differently from the Broadway musical.

It will be interesting to see Domingo’s take on the character, especially since the character in question will be CGI like the rest of the Animals in these films. In the first film, Game Of Thrones alum Peter Dinklage played Dr. Dillamond, a professor of Life Science at Shiz University and a Goat. Wicked: For Good will also star Ethan Slater as Boq Woodsman, Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard, Bowen Yang as Pfannee, Marissa Bode as Nessarose Thropp and Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible.

The sequel lands in theaters on November 21st, just about a year after the first film’s theatrical debut. I will be there on opening night with a review to follow here on this blog. The film is a bit shorter than the first – 2 hours and 18 minutes instead of 2 hours and 40 minutes – which is both welcome and makes sense given the amount of story left to tell. You can read my review of Wicked right here.