Michonne gets the craziest gifts from ‘Walking Dead’ fans

The last words you would use to describe Michonne, the sword-wielding zombie-apocalypse survivor on “The Walking Dead,” are warm and fuzzy.

Beheading zombies with abandon, sometimes driving her curved katana through their skulls just to change it up a bit, she is never less than fierce, focused and fearsome. Yet fans have embraced actress Danai Gurira, who has starred on the hit show for four bloody seasons, with the kind of love and admiration reserved only for TV characters who have truly touched them.

I like exploring those experiences with humankind that put them under duress, that cause them to have to change or adjust or transform.

 - Danai Gurira

They’ve given her Michonne dolls, refrigerator magnets, clutches and T-shirts (her favorite says “Katana Queen”). At Comic-Con last July, the actress met a viewer who had covered her body in tattoos of the show’s characters, including Michonne.

“She had tattoos everywhere,” says Gurira, 37, unable to suppress her amusement during our Alexa cover shoot in Chelsea Market.

“Back. Arms. Calves. Tattoos of our faces. I was like, ‘Maybe you won’t [always] like the show. Maybe it will change for you.’ She was like, ‘No. I still l have my “Lord of the Rings” tattoos.’ I was like, ‘OK.’ ”

The stages at Comic-Con are several worlds (and mindsets) away from the one Gurira knows and loves best: writing. Even as she debuted on “The Walking Dead,” Gurira was making her mark as a playwright. Her “In the Continuum,” co-written with Nikkole Salter, which deals with two black women living with HIV, won an Obie in 2006.

Her most famous play, “Eclipsed,” about five women thrust together by unrest in their Liberian homeland, will debut on Broadway on Feb. 23, starring Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o.

“We did three premieres in 2009, but we knew we weren’t done with this play yet,” she says. “To see it come full circle like this is more than I could have imagined.”

The youngest of four children born to academic parents — her father is a chemistry professor, her mother a librarian — in Grinnell, Iowa (population 9,000), she moved to Zimbabwe with her family when she was 5 years old and grew up there, not returning to the States until it was time for college. She got her undergraduate degree at Macalester, a small liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minn., and a master’s in acting at NYU.

In person, the actress is the picture of serenity and self-possession. Clad in a white terry robe, she sits in a makeup chair while a stylist paints her toenails a persimmon color to match her manicure.

Gurira holds a paperback in her lap: Chinua Achebe’s classic novel of African colonization, “Things Fall Apart.”

The book, which she’s bringing to an appearance that night on the interview series “Person Place Thing,” is both a symbol — of everything that was wrong with her high-school education — and a reminder — of why she became determined to develop her own voice and relate the stories of young African women.

“It’s the first time I really got to read African literature,” she says. “I read it about 12 years ago. I should have read it in high school. I went to high school in southern Africa. Our teachers picked very Anglicized literature. ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ ‘Emma.’ And a ton of Shakespeare, for which I’m glad. ‘Lord of the Flies.’ And ‘Gulliver’s Travels.’ We did not touch African literature.” The teachers, she says, dismissed all works from the region. “ ‘Oh, that’s from Africa.’ And that was the kind of [attitude] I had to undo when I went to college.”

A makeup artist carefully lines Gurira’s lids with a white base and then a slender streak of ultramarine. Copper-colored shadow deepens her already striking brown eyes. When a hairdresser snips her close-cropped hair, Gurira gasps.

“I didn’t cut anything,” he assures her. “I’m doing a film,” she says, explaining that she can’t really change her appearance.

In that biopic of Tupac Shakur, the actress plays the late rapper’s mother, Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther who was acquitted of 150 charges of conspiracy against the US government.

“She was astounding,” Gurira says. “She managed to keep her son’s mind as sharp as it was. She always managed to expose him to culture and art and literature.”

The movie, “All Eyez on Me,” just began shooting in Georgia, Gurira’s home away from home, where she is “cloistered” six months of the year for “The Walking Dead.” (She splits the rest of her time between LA and NYC, and is also developing a series for HBO.)

Even though horror films have never previously appealed to her, “The Walking Dead” met her dramatic requirements. “There’s great intensity that the job calls for. The characters are constantly in dire circumstances,” she says. “But that’s my thing. I like exploring those experiences with humankind that put them under duress, that cause them to have to change or adjust or transform.”

Her Michonne audition was a precise collision of brain and brawn, according to executive producer Gale Anne Hurd. After a wide range of actresses took a crack at the role,

“[Gurira] walked in and you could sense the gravitas,” Hurd says. “She means business. We needed someone who was formidable in bringing strength to her role, but with her intellect. She’s that.”

Indeed, the moment she sets down Michonne’s sword, Gurira steals away to the nearest writers’ retreat to work on her plays.

She likes California’s Ojai Playwrights Conference, where she worked on her newest play, “Familiar,” the story of a marriage between a Zimbabwean woman and a Minnesotan man.

“There are times when I yearn to go there, to be alone. To battle the story into submission,” she says. “But I’ve got to get all my mess out of the way so it can tell me what it is. Sometimes if I’m not needed in an episode, I’ll go to a B&B in upstate New York. Just to get that time and space away.”

For someone so private, the topic of relationships brings out her natural reticence. Gurira’s more comfortable talking about her rescue mutt, Papi, than anyone she’s dating. “I tend to keep that conversation out of conversations,” she answers politely.

With her makeup and hair complete, Gurira rises gracefully to get dressed. Her first outfit — a vermilion crepe dress by Milly — is a stunner, giving her a bare-shouldered, poised elegance.

Photographer Jeff Riedel coaches her through a range of poses: arms crossed, one leg raised behind her so you can get a load of the red suede Manolo Blahniks on her feet. Then he asks her, “Have you ever danced in your career?”

She laughs and shakes her head: “I’m terrible.”

She’s certainly found her rhythm on “The Walking Dead,” which returns on Feb. 14 with eight new episodes that promise to take the show to a whole new level. Hurd confirms that Michonne’s story “kicks up a few notches — and she continues to have an incredible journey in the comic book series.”

It’s the kind of hit that could run for years — and while Gurira doesn’t know how Michonne’s storyline will ultimately play out, Hurd and her fellow producers are eager to keep her onboard for the duration.

“Because we have an actress of Danai’s ability and range, there’s no question we can keep her interested for years,” Hurd says.

For now, Gurira is focused on the new season.

“There will be transformations in personal lives,” she hints. “How one survives, that gets redefined. I think there’s a lot of redefinition happening that we’ve never come close to seeing before.

“The thing that’s really amazing about the show is the really rich storytelling,” she continues. “So you are always called to do something different. And that is challenging and thrilling.”

Much like Gurira herself.