Negan and Maggie take Manhattan: Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan on their ‘Walking Dead’ spinoff

On Sunday, June 18, AMC unveils The Walking Dead: Dead City. The spinoff stars, and is executive produced by, TWD veterans Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan reprising, respectively, as Negan and Maggie.

The series has the pair teaming up to try to rescue Maggie’s son, Hershel from a post-apocalyptic New York City — a mission complicated by Negan and Maggie’s past: He bludgeoned Hershel’s dad, Glenn, to death with his barbed-wire baseball bat years ago, after all.

“It’s already a great new stimulus to be in a real way with Jeff because we do … avoid each other so much of The Walking Dead, understandably,” Cohan says. 

She calls the six-episode show “wonderful because we get this new blood … by being in New York and being with new characters and by seeing each other in different ways.”

Morgan agrees, “We both are pretty comfortable in [these] shoes, but those shoes stepping on the pavement, and for the first time, is pretty amazing.”

Negan’s character has softened somewhat in recent years. But with Hershel’s life on the line, the old Negan comes back, to the delight of fans who saw him in action at a recent screening using a bad guy’s head as the punchline in a knock-knock joke.

“I loved it,” JDM enthuses. “Look, there’s parts of Negan that I obviously love because it’s why I wanted to do the role in the first place … . And I think to be able to bring him out again was a lot of fun for me as an actor.”

He adds, “But then to hear the reaction of the crowd when he does his knock-knock joke was awesome. It was, like, so cool. I was really glad to see that people kind of wanted to see him back a little bit, as well, so it was fun.”