He played a bad guy in the film “The Blind Side,” but IronE Singleton is anything but bad. The actor grew up in the Atlanta projects, where guns, drugs and hopelessness were pervasive. Yet he found his way out, graduating from the University of Georgia, where he played football. He plays T-Dog on AMC’s hit “The Walking Dead,” a zombie apocalypse series. Married with children, the 37-year-old is very spiritual. “The Walking Dead” returns to AMC on Feb. 12, at 9 p.m.
Q: What prompted you to change your name from “Robert” to “IronE”?
A: The thing that happened was my life. (Laughs). “IronE” stands for an eagle in flight with an unbroken spirit. I coined that term because it is indicative of my life story and the fact that I’m out of the inner city. Statistics state that as a young black male from the inner city, I would be either in prison or dead or, more than likely, hanging out on a street corner selling drugs or something like that. So once I graduated from college, and right before I moved to L.A., God just put it in my heart. There was this overwhelming desire to come up with a name that served as an icebreaker. “IronE” was it.
Q: So how did you find your way out of the projects and a situation so many see as hopeless?
A: Speaking metaphysically, there is just this overwhelming power, this supreme being in my life. It was bigger, way larger than life. I refer to it as God. I always had a relationship with God as early as 8- years-old …
I visited my paternal grandmother and saw that the life that she lived totally contrasted with the life that I had lived in the projects. So it inspired me to want more out of life. It made me more ambitious because before that I didn’t know that anything else really existed except on the TV. …
Q: The underlying theme of “Walking Dead” is never give up, and it seems that is something you have always embraced in your life.
A: That is exactly it. You survive by any means necessary. There were a lot of moments in my life where I could have died or I could have ended up serving 20 years to life in prison. I overcame those things, those obstacles, because I listened and I obeyed that higher power that was speaking to me at the crucial moments in my life when it really counted. A lot of my friends didn’t, and they ended up either going to prison and serving life terms or dying.
