Fans were excited to see General Hospital alum Lindsey Morgan (ex-Kristina) on television again when she was cast as Micki Ramirez in Walker on The CW. And they were then disappointed when the actress cited personal reasons and excited the primetime drama series in its second season. Now, however, she has opened up further about what led her to make that decision.
“I had a spinal injury, which was affecting my nervous system and my brainstem,” Morgan said in a clip from the I’ve Never Said This Before podcast obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.
Morgan got her big break when she was cast as the new Kristina Davis on GH in 2012, and she earned a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Younger Actress in 2013. After leaving GH in 2013, she went on to play Raven on The CW sci-fi series The 100 and starred in the films Beyond Skyline and Skylines among other roles. And she was thrilled when she landed the lead role of Micki on Walker starring opposite Jared Padelecki.
“I was really blessed and lucky that I started working and didn’t stop,” Morgan admitted. “But, looking back, I realized my mistake in the sense of, like an athlete, I was working, working, working, outputting, outputting, outputting, but I wasn’t recovering. All my dreams were coming true, and I was a mess. Me, personally, was not in a good place. My anxiety was through the roof.
“I feel like I did not do good work,” she continued. “And looking back on it now, it was because I was so stressed out in my body — mentally and physically. I was a mess. I couldn’t figure out why. I have all of this responsibility on my shoulders, and I felt like I was failing everyone — and myself.”
When faced with the choice of either continuing to work at this pace and taking medication to cope — possibly for the rest of her life — or making some serious adjustments to her lifestyle, Morgan made the difficult decision to step away from Walker to give herself time to recover. “I’m somebody that really pushes themselves and has really high standards and I never wanted to let anyone around me down,” she confessed. “I felt a little like I let Jared down, or let the show down, and that was the hardest part for me, because it still makes me emotional, which I know is silly because I was doing what I needed to do to take care of myself, and that’s more important.”
