Dead And Loving It! ‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Cast on Bringing New Life to the Franchise

What do you do when you’ve just wrapped up an epic, 11-season run on one of the most successful TV shows of all time? Do an encore, of course. Except The Walking Dead: Dead City, which premieres Sunday at 9/8c on AMC and is now streaming on AMC+, is anything but a straight sequel. Sure it stars franchise stalwarts Lauren Cohan as Maggie Rhee, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan (both of whom also produce the series), teaming up to rescue Maggie’s son from a zombie-infested Manhattan. But Dead City, particularly in the early going, takes its cues more from ’70s/’80s post-apocalyptic sci-fi like Escape From New York and The Warriors than writer Robert Kirkman’s zombie opus.

“The movies you mentioned, Escape from New York, The Warriors, we were all very cognizant and big fans of those movies as well,” Morgan told Decider during a recent press day for the series. “They were in the conversation when [showrunner] Eli [Jorné] was writing the scripts from the jump. And there are Easter eggs throughout the series for those movies in particular. I loved it because it gives me some Snake Plissken all day, every day.”

If anyone is going to revive Kurt Russell’s classic character from Escape From New York, it’s probably Morgan. But things are arguably even more complicated in TWD Manhattan than Escape From New York Manhattan, which has been mostly cut off from the world for the duration of the zombie apocalypse thanks to the government blowing the bridges and tunnels into and out of the city. Not only does this NYC have different post-apocalyptic factions, rampaging pests, and the labyrinthian and dangerous streets of New York… It’s also got, you know: zombies.

Cohan, who has played Maggie since Season 2 of The Walking Dead (with a few seasons’ break), found the fresh setting and tone were a large part of the appeal of immediately coming back. “The story was so different,” Cohan noted, on bringing Maggie directly from the Georgia set of the TWD finale to the New York/New Jersey-based set of Dead City. “Understanding where the other people that are in New York are, how they’re surviving, and what the ingenuity of their survival is, it’s like, okay, this is just going to be a different thing that we’re coming up against. We’re coming up against the people in the city, but we’re also dealing with the emotional baggage that comes with these two on the road together.”

For those who aren’t familiar with the insanely complicated relationship between Negan and Maggie, don’t worry, it’s a major driving force behind Dead City, the first of AMC’s three planned direct spinoff series from TWD (also including the forthcoming Norman Reedus starring Daryl Dixon series, and one focusing on Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes and Danai Gurira’s Michonne). But to catch you up quickly: back in the day Maggie first met Negan when he was bashing her husband Glenn’s (Steven Yeun) head to a pulp with his barbed wire baseball bat. In the years since Negan and Maggie haven’t become friends. But they have been thrust into various life-threatening situations together, and they’ve formed if not a tentative bond of trust, at least a begrudging respect for each other’s skills.

That’s mostly out the window when things pick up years later in Dead City, as Maggie is tracking down Negan because of his connection to the man who kidnapped her son — and Negan isn’t necessarily gung-ho to head off with a woman who wants to kill him, in order to face down another man who wants to kill him.

“To then take these two characters that we’ve been playing and can do in our sleep in some ways, and put them in this new environment… there’s a lot of fun to it,” Morgan added. “But there’s also, we’ve done a deep dive into both Maggie and Negan that we were never able to do before, and to do that in this new environment… It’s a great jumping-off point for a new show.”

Speaking of that environment, it’s cliché to say that New York is another character in the show, but Morgan isn’t wrong to call it out (“It’s as important a character as any one of us, there is no city like this,” Morgan said). Though the bulk of the series was shot in New Jersey subbing in for NYC — the Meadowlands Arena in NJ standing in for Madison Square Garden in NYC was frequently called out as a favorite by the cast members — a large part of the show is about exploring specific locations as Maggie, Negan and the company they make fight their way Uptown from Wall Street through a zombie-infested Big Apple.

“I remember when we were downtown shooting Delmonico’s zombies falling from the sky,” Morgan recalled. “We shot two nights there and I remember just looking up and the blood is everywhere and just thinking: ‘This is the show, this is the show, that’s why we’re here.'”

There are other characters, though, and not just stand-out zombies like a fused, multiple-walker monstrosity glimpsed in the series’s trailer. The mastermind behind this whole plot is a man only known as The Croat, played by Željko Ivanek, who somehow even scares Negan.

“I learned from the best,” Ivanek teased with a laugh. “The goal is not to be horrible to people. The goal is to create a world where you can protect people. Unfortunately, that divides the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and ‘us’ do okay, and the ‘them’ are expendable, and the ‘them’ are a threat. So it takes you to a very scary path, very quickly.”

The Croat isn’t the only force aligned against Maggie and Negan. Though the show doesn’t delve too much into life after the end of The Walking Dead, as fans of the franchise might expect the hopeful ending that led to a new confederation of allied communities has soured somewhat in the intervening years. The civilization of New Babylon is at the top of the food chain, and their law is reinforced by Marshals, including Gaius Charles’ Perlie Armstrong, a man on a mission to bring Negan back — dead or alive.

Though Perlie might seem like he walked straight off the set of a classic Western, for Charles, formulating the character was more about his particular circumstances, than looking to any classic flicks for inspiration. “When you’re in a rural area, how does that change where you are?” Charles said. “When you’re in the North versus the South, how does that change the way you speak, or the way you move, or how you exercise, or exude authority? Those are some of the things that helped me begin to formulate the character.”

And last but not least, despite Negan’s final appearance in The Walking Dead having him head off with his pregnant wife, when we pick up she’s nowhere to be seen. Instead the former merciless killer is on the run with a mute girl named Ginny, played by Mahina Napoleon. Naturally, not being able to speak created challenges for the young actress.

“When I had a scene when I didn’t speak, which was most of them, I played off my co-stars emotions, which helped me a lot,” Napoleon said. “If Negan was angry at Ginny or sad I could play off that and express that into my character. If he was irritating me, I would roll my eyes. Or if he was making me angry, I would just ignore him.”

Over the course of the six episodes, these characters — and more, including a few surprises — will clash on the streets of New York, and inside some iconic locations, including Cohan’s favorite — which is too much of a spoiler for the season finale.

Wait: season finale? That’s not a typo. Though fans initially assumed Dead City would be a limited series, the door is open for Dead City 2, if the viewers demand it. “It’s a little bit TBD,” Cohan said when asked about a potential second season. “I think we’d like to do it if it makes sense.”

Morgan elaborated, adding, “It’s been a conversation for over a year, the environment is so, with the writer strike and everything that’s going on right now, let’s see what happens. But look, we hope to be able to have a conversation about that very soon.”

That is if they both make it out of Dead City alive.

The Walking Dead: Dead City airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC, and streams the Thursday before on AMC+.