TWD: Dead City's Stars Revel In The Chance To 'Push Those Boundaries' Further As Maggie And Negan

Speaking with Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan over Zoom, it's obvious that the Walking Dead: Dead City stars get along like a house on fire. There's an ease between them, a casual rapport that allows one of them to pick up an interview question where the other leaves off. Of course, they have to check that camaraderie at the door to play Negan and Maggie on their Walking Dead spinoff (which premieres Sunday, June 18, on AMC at 9/8c). 

Though it had seemed like Glenn's widow and his killer had made a kind of peace in the mothership's finale (recapped here), "that's not how the story went," Morgan tells TVLine. "So now we're going to catch up with our characters a couple of years later. Maggie has to track down Negan — probably the last person she wants to be dealing with — because she needs his help" rescuing her and Glenn's kidnapped son, Hershel.

"We find them in a pretty tense state," Cohan adds. 

In the years that Maggie and Negan weren't in one another's faces on the regular, the heat has been turned back up on her hatred of her husband's murderer. "I think Maggie has come to a place where she is reminded daily about the Glenn situation in dealing with Hershel," Morgan suggests. So "the wounds are open and fresh and bleeding again, and as much as it pains her to have to go to Negan, he is the one man who can help her."

There remains the hope, however faint, that Maggie and Negan can achieve some kind of closure. Besides the task at hand, Cohan muses, "is there also this other reason [that fate is] throwing Maggie back into the biggest hurt and the most impactful inciting incident of her life? They say that the only way out is through." If Maggie and Negan get that far, perhaps on the other side, "we'll get to some true understanding of each other. That's certainly the goal."

Whether it's achievable... well, that's another matter altogether. "Look, I think they could kill each other at any minute," Morgan says. "Maggie could stab him [any second], you know what I mean? This is a very unlikely duo, and we knew it from the beginning. When the show was announced, everybody was like, 'Well, how the hell is this going to work?' It works because we just don't know what's going to happen and how these two are going to make it through a minute, much less a season.

"Throughout the show, we have these moments where they almost connect — like there may be something that both of them see in each other that they understand," he goes on. "But within the scene, that's gone, and it's back to the hatred again. It's been fun getting to push those boundaries and play with that in a way that we never really got to on the main series because we just never had the time."