Lennie James admits The Walking Dead was so intense he had to start taking CBD oil to stop ‘night terrors’

Lennie James has admitted that his decade spent acting in the apocalypse drama The Walking Dead was so intense that he began taking CBD oil to prevent night terrors.

James, 59, best known for his role in the show as a devoted father, Morgan Jones, who’s fighting for survival during a zombie apocalypse, has revealed that playing the character began to affect his personal life in the form of disturbing dreams.

When asked by The Guardian if he learnt anything about survival from acting in the show, he responded: “One of the byproducts of being in the zombie world for as long as I was, was I started having very vivid and lucid dreams.”

He added: “I would quite often wake up shouting in the midst of a night terror, waking the house and making it difficult for my wife to sleep next to me.”

James said that he was recommended CBD oil, a solution containing cannabidiol from a cannabis plant, as a remedy for relaxation.

“It works,” he said. “So I’d take that into a dystopia.”

James’s character appeared just three times in the first five seasons of the programme, but in 2013, he became a series regular.

In 2015, he made the jump to appear in the show’s spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead, as its lead.

However, James previously told The Independent that he had doubts about fronting the follow-up series.

“When I was deciding whether or not to say yes to the crossover, I was like: ‘There’s really no point doing this outside of the gimmick.’ Because once the press had died down on that, my job was still to play the guy," he said.

The show, which ran for 11 seasons from 2010 to 2022, lost popularity when its seventh season aired in 2016 and slashed the show’s viewership. By its 10th season, ratings hit an all-time low, with just 4.5 million viewers turning in for the first episode of the series. By comparison, the season five premiere had amassed 17.3 million when it aired in 2014.

Still, the show went on the have several spin-off series to be released by AMC, including The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Tales from the Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead.

James is also known for playing the bent copper Tony Gates in BBC’s Line of Duty and Nelly Rowe in Sky’s Save Me. His most recent role, as Barrington in the BBC adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman, has earned him a solo nomination at this year’s Bafta TV Awards.