Lauren Cohan

Dimitri: Congratulation on the show The Walking Dead: Dead City. The new trailer is out now. Looks very impressive. 

Lauren Cohan: Thank you. This is going to be the main trailer before show premieres on the 18th of June.

Dimitri: You have such an excellent cast. What is it like revisiting your character from The Walking Dead? Especially re-teaming with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, you guys have very unique dynamics between each other.

Lauren Cohan: It’s interesting because you’re typically paired with someone who will ultimately become your character’s romantic interest, or who’s a clear nemesis you need to defeat, but the case with Maggie and Negan falls in a gray area which isn’t so cut and dry.

The unanswered question with these two has always been, will Maggie take him out – her husband died horrendously by his hand – but I think the thing that has stopped her, whether she is aware of it or not is wondering if killing him will make anything better.

Will retribution free her from the crippling emotions? Life is complicated. We can make mistakes, we can say, “I’m sorry.” We can change our scenery, but the things that really rankle us are so deep within us, controlling so much of how we make decisions, and that’s really what we get to explore for the entirety of the series. In this season, Maggie literally can’t make Negan go away because she needs his help. But on a larger scale, we’re looking at people who have such unprocessed trauma directing them, who don’t have the opportunity –  or make the opportunity – to confront it, and who can blame them? They’re so busy surviving.

From Maggie’s perspective, or for me to live in when playing her, she wants to believe that Negan is the bad guy and I’m the good guy, and everything that either of them does keeps them in those categories. But, what the show does, which is more interesting in life and in Dead City is to take people out of hero and anti-hero archetypes.The opportunity to develop Maggie over these years in a world with such extreme stakes, is a chance to challenge those ideas. The linear perspective she strived to have is disrupted. For this struggling group of people, just holding on, in a landscape that can seem so sparse, what surprise is within the world and within ourselves? I think hope comes from the belief that we can change, that we see things differently, and also meet ourselves again.

I think it’s true to life, that idea of exploring what traps or what prisons we all live in, visible or not, that keep us from being able to be present, from being able to connect, from being able to evolve, and how many of those are of our own making? There is just all this rich stuff that has been so nourishing to reveal and to question in the show.

Dimitri: Absolutely, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be quite an emotionally driven season, especially because, well, you guys– let’s just put it lightly, are “Not the best of friends.”

Lauren Cohan: Not the best of friends, and also, to put it simply, he is somebody that has caused great harm, that Maggie has to now face on a daily basis…yes, it’s tricky [laughs].

Dimitri: Based on the trailer, you’ve taken the show into the completely new realm of New York City. Will fans see something new and unexpected?

Lauren Cohan: I hope so! Dead City has the deep emotional character explorations that were a big part of our mothership show, but now we have a completely new physical backdrop of New York City. Seeing Maggie and Negan together, in a new location, as well as the new characters we meet as we continue their journey – there’s a very hard edge to both the people and the situations they face that are going to make it feel like a whole new world – viewers will definitely notice. I hope people will enjoy meeting our version of Manhattan.

Dimitri: It’s a completely brand new universe, let’s put it this way. You’ve been running around in the woods for God knows how long.

Lauren Cohan: Yes. [laughs]

Dimitri: Taking it, that this is a completely new universe, totally brand new to the whole concept of the show. There’s so much expansion, and do you think Eli will continue expanding the universe?

Lauren Cohan: That’s the goal, yes. We have Norman’s character Daryl spinning off in Paris, Maggie and Negan are of course in New York, and then Rick and Michonne in another location. There are separate showrunners for each spinoff, with Eli being ours, and Scott Gimple overseeing the intersection of all the characters in The Walking Dead Universe. New York was not the first place we discussed setting Dead City, actually. There were options for the show to be set in a more disparate location – we talked about the desert or maybe somewhere in the mountains. We had different options, but I think once the idea of Maggie and Negan in New York came up for Eli, that one was just a little too hard to pass up.

We were lucky to get to work in the city and shoot in such visibly iconic New York locations – like Wall Street and along the Hudson River – and really do things that highlight New York and showcase the scale and verticality of this new concrete forest [laughs], which is so different from the softness of the woods we saw in Georgia. It’s been fun to explore ways the people of Manhattan have made it possible to survive in our universe – the ways that are different to Georgia.

We have characters scaling crumbling elevator shafts and derelict buildings and living on top of skyscrapers, using zip lines to get through the city. Scaling this terrain was jarring for Maggie and Negan equally. You have these two people that are at odds with each other, but then are facing something together that’s bigger and scarier than even their relationship to each other. Or is it? We’ll see. [laughs]

Dimitri: Your new series has a completely different tone for everything.  There’s a lot of darkness in it.

Lauren: You see these people that are really capable. They’re obviously tough and they’ve seen a lot, but they haven’t been in this environment before, so it’s an extra challenge to the characters. Imagine the island of Manhattan, all bridges blown – (almost) everybody remaining on it is now an army of the dead – and Maggie and Negan have to walk through it. We don’t know how, we don’t know where Maggie’s son is, and we have to navigate these terrors that are both dead and living, as well as the people who run the city who don’t want us there. There’s a big fight for control of Manhattan, which it turns out is still a type of hotspot in this world.

Dimitri: Absolutely.

Lauren: It has resources.

Dimitri: I’m just trying to process the creative to just imagine, well, in that scale, especially when it comes to sci-fi, when it comes to the horror, it’s fairly complex– That’s why I always found it, the sci-fi writers or the horror writers like Stephen King, they’re quite unique writers because you need to imagine that in non-linear scenarios. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.

Lauren: Yes! I think writers have an opportunity to introduce very different perspectives with science fiction. The interesting thing about Eli is that he majored in Physics. Then, long before our show, he transitioned to writing and is now a showrunner of this sci-fi show. I’d say we are actually sort of an exception because most of what he writes is ironically not Sci-Fi, but it’s really cool to have a physicist writing the show and bringing elements to Dead City that, should a character need to arm themselves with an evident resource (which, in our story, are these dead bodies everywhere), that he and our writers were able to think of a unique way to do that.

That’s one thing that we get to do on the show – show the ingenuity of travel through the city, as well as resourcefulness, good or bad, in regaining perceived power and normalcy in a new world. I don’t want to give too much away, but that’s a big piece of what happens on Dead City. When it comes to sci-fi, and the tone of The Walking Dead, we need to make it grounded as well.

Dimitri: Emotional, but by realistic, as scary as it is, that it can actually happen on a different scale like pandemics.

Lauren Cohan: In this kind of story, in all stories I guess, I want to feel: how close is this to reality as I know it. It’s a slight turn of the dial to see the world that we are in – and then a world that’s possible. I like that we get to use that as a metaphor to ask what we would really do. What would be the most important thing? How would we behave? Would it give us relief?

Getting the chance to both know these characters and then get to know them in an entirely different light in Dead City is, to me, what makes it scary, because we know zombies, we’re familiar with them in this universe and on other shows as well. What we get to continue to do here is say because we care about Maggie and Negan, even if we don’t know how they’re going to do with each other, we care about them as people, who they’re striving to be.

I think that the deeper we can go into a character, the more everything else feels scary. Action and big set pieces and all of those things don’t really mean much if you’re not invested in character. That’s why I like grounded action and high-stakes situations.

Dimitri: You have been amazing with your time. For the last question, I would like to ask, if you could give your younger-self any advice, what kind of advice would it be?

Lauren Cohan: Okay, truly the advice I would give to my younger self or any younger self is that the thing that makes life good are the people that you create with. Whether you’re creating in your work or in your hobbies or in any arena, it’s just to recognize and to trust the way you feel around certain people, and to listen to that more than anything, because it’s from that place where all the good stuff is born.

You get to have fun making things, and that’s what’s infectious. That’s what lets you keep making them and keep doing them and keep pursuing the things that matter to you. It’s important to use your mind and to think creatively and deeply about everything, but don’t forget to always check in with your gut. Just check in with your heart because that’s really what I think we’re here for.