It is a photoshopped reaction meme of the actor Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes in the Walking Dead, exaggeratingly tilting his head. Throughout the series, the actor often tilted his head during certain scenes to convey emotion or realization to the point people recognized his head tilt usage being over the top. From there it was exaggerated further with edits.

Google trends sites it as gaining traction September 28, 2025.

While screenshots from the show of Rick Grimes tilting his head have been used before as reaction pictures among the Walking Dead community, this image is edited to be exaggerated and has emerged in non-Walking Dead scenarios.

The earliest known instance was on posted by user El Ojo De Carl on Instagram and Facebook, both on October 17, 2024. The Instagram post got 13K likes and the Facebook post got 18K likes. It had the caption: “Sabes que la cosa se va a poner seria cuando Rick Grimes inclina su cabeza de esta forma”, which is Spanish and translates to “You know things are going to get serious when Rick Grimes tilts his head like this”.

Its first viral breakout happened in response to user Alex DiMauro (@alexvoiceguy), a voice actor and creator on TikTok. He does impressions and skits based on different tv shows and films, and on September 7th, 2025 started a series acting like Rick Grimes where he tilts his head excessively. In May of 2025, TikTok added a feature for users to add pictures in comment sections, this has been utilized primarily for reaction images. In DiMauro’s comment section the image started being used frequently as user searched for an appropriate reaction image. While the earliest comment containing this on that post from @jjh4t3u is from September 12th, 2025, the comment gained more traction early October. This is due to his first video of the series having 249.9K view compared to his follow up videos with 2.3M, 2.7M, 7.3 M, 10.1 M, and several more in the 1M range.