The series, which was originally set to air in the spring, will premiere Sunday, June 18 on AMC and AMC+.
Actors Lauren Cohan and Gaius Charles sat on a panel with showrunner Eli Jorné at the WonderCon event in California. Jorné explained what the new series has to offer both loyal fans of The Walking Dead and newcomers.
“It’s The Walking Dead like we’ve never seen it before. We haven’t really lived in a city like this.” Jorné said. “It’s The Walking Dead like we’ve never seen it before. We haven’t really lived in a city like this.” Jorné said. “It’s New York; there’s skyscrapers up to the sky and a million and a half walkers. And for characters like Maggie and Negan, who’ve been running through the woods for a long time, it’s just a whole new world that’s just extremely claustrophobic, scary, and also, as you’ll discover, has pockets of survivors, you’ll get to see all the strange new ways they live in the apocalypse, it’s definitely like nothing you’ve seen before.”
The Walking Dead: Dead City follows Maggie (Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as they journey to a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, long ago cut off from the mainland. The crumbling city is filled with the dead and residents who have made New York City their own world full of anarchy, danger, beauty and terror.
“It’s interesting because we see a very unprocessed level of trauma that we know happened between Maggie and Negan. In Dead City, we really get a chance to [ask], ‘What is this? What does it take to move through it?’” Cohan said. “And more than anything, it’s a chance for us to be forced together on this mission. The tension and unmovable things are still very present. We’ve seen them intersect so often, but in this show, it’s really this tunnel that they’re trapped in to face things they may have run away from, more so what Maggie has run away from and what Negan[‘s presence] brings up for her. It’s like an exercise in intimacy with the worst person.”
Jorné further explained the complexity of their relationship this time around: “It’s the next chapter in the story of Maggie and Negan, and so in that sense, it’s a lot of grief, trauma, and loss on both sides and how do you navigate that? How does Maggie look in Negan’s face every day and remember what he did to the love of her life? That’s still a huge part of the show. For anybody who’s watched the walking dead all these years and connected to those characters, we’re continuing the story, growing it, evolving it, and deepening it in a whole new landscape.”
The six-episode series also stars Jonathan Higginbotham, Mahina Napoleon, Trey Santiago-Hudson, and Charlie Solis. It is the fourth spinoff in the Walking Dead universe following Fear The Walking Dead, World Beyond and Tales of the Walking Dead and is the first sequel to the original Walking Dead series.
Below you can see the latest teaser trailer for The Walking Dead: Dead City with a look behind the scenes.
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