(Spoiler alert: Please do not read on if you haven’t watched Sunday’s episode of “The Walking Dead)
Carl Grimes’ run on “The Walking Dead” might be over, but the actor who plays him, Chandler Riggs, could have a future as a professional video game player if the whole acting thing doesn’t work out.
Riggs is actually a pretty skilled player of the popular PC and Xbox One game “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.” Before his final turn as Carl in “The Walking Dead,” which aired Sunday as the show came back from its mid-season finale, Riggs appeared on Microsoft’s “Xbox Live Sessions” streaming show on Mixer.com to show off his gamer skills. Watch it here.
The 18-year-old actor started on “The Walking Dead” at age 10. As the son of the sheriff Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Carl grew up in the show’s post-apocalyptic world to become a fan-favorite character. Over the years, he’s shot and stabbed his share of the undead, as well as other humans, as the characters on the show have battled to stay alive over the years.
The kinds of skills Carl developed as a boy growing up in a zombie-infested world translate pretty well into “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds,” in fact. The game is inspired by the Japanese movie “Battle Royale,” in which a group of school kids are dropped on an island and forced to kill each other with a variety of weapons. In “Battlegrounds,” around 100 players parachute onto a mostly deserted island with nothing. When they land, they quickly try to search houses and buildings to find guns and other gear, in an attempt to be the last player standing.
Despite the zombie survival experience he’s undoubtedly picked up from working on “The Walking Dead,” Riggs didn’t win any of the matches he played in the stream, but he did show off some serious skills. He said he’s put dozens of hours into the game with friends and won countless matches — somewhere around 70, he guessed.
Riggs also answered players’s questions during the session, which streamed over the weekend ahead of “The Walking Dead.” He had a word of advice for viewers asking what to expect from his final moments on the show.
“You’re definitely going to need some tissues for this episode, it’s really really depressing,” he jokingly warned. If fans’ reactions to the episode on social media were any indication, he was right.