Andrew Lincoln didn’t mind stripping down onscreen — though his children have opposing thoughts about it.
“Look, I’m just thrilled that people are still asking me to get naked at 50,” the Walking Dead alum, 51, told The Times of London in a Friday, September 5, profile about his steamy shower scene in Coldwater. “I said to [my son], Arthur, ‘How would you feel about me pleasuring myself on national television?’”
On the ITV thriller, Lincoln, who shares 15-year-old Arthur and 17-year-old Matilda with wife Gael Anderson, is caught masturbating in the shower by his TV wife, played by Indira Varma.
“[My son] said, ‘What do you think?’ My children haven’t talked to me since I did the job,” Lincoln quipped to the outlet. “My son just said, ‘Can you just not have waited for three years until I was through school?’”
According to Lincoln, his kids likely won’t watch Coldwater anyway because they have their own lives. He proudly told the British newspaper that Matilda recently passed her driving test, while Arthur is content “drinking protein drinks and getting jacked.”
Lincoln, however, did note that wife Anderson, 55, watched Coldwater on behalf of their family and gave the show “the thumbs up.”
Despite rave reviews from his wife of 19 years, Lincoln nearly turned the Coldwater role down because he thought it was “frightening.”
“I thought, this is a very, very difficult tightrope to walk,” he said of the show chronicling sexual assault. “In the eyes of the audience, this character is essentially being emasculated in all areas of his life and is in free fall.”
It was ultimately screenwriter David Ireland’s script that changed Lincoln’s mind about the part.
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“It’s about these two strange versions of masculinity colliding,” Lincoln told The Times “It’s putting under a microscope what a certain type of modern man looks like and what’s expected of him. After doing something that is quite operatic in scale in America, it felt really nice to get down and be as naturalistic as this.”
Lincoln also liked how his character, John, was different from himself and previous characters he’s played through the years.
“John has no community. Then he meets this guy in a happy marriage who has faith and within five minutes he’s able to bare his soul — a thing he can’t say to his therapist or his wife,” he added. “I think we live in a world where everybody’s too busy on their phones. We have more communication than we’ve ever had before and yet we’re more isolated.”
