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While fans will have to wait until 2025 for the second season of The Walking Dead: Dead City, the cast and crew behind the hit AMC series spilled some secrets behind the upcoming episodes in an exclusive interview with Den of Geek at Comic-Con International 2024 in San Diego.
Longtime Walking Dead character Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan) is still out to rescue her kidnapped son Hershel (Logan Kim), but unable to put her bitter history with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) behind her long enough to work with him. Meanwhile, the survivor factions in the ruins of New York City find themselves on the verge of an escalating war for control of Manhattan.
Much of Dead City is fueled by the contentious dynamic between Maggie and Negan, with the latter finding himself a wanted man by the New Babylon Federation for murdering five people. The first season introduced Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles), a New Babylon marshal tasked with tracking Negan down and bringing him to justice for the crime. However, after Negan saved his life and revealed more about himself to Perlie, the wayward marshal lied to his superiors at New Babylon, claiming he killed the fugitive himself. This lie will inform much of Perlie’s arc and relationship with Negan moving into the second season of Dead City.
“Season 2 kicks off with me trying to figure out my way through that,” Charles teases. “Through this season, maybe I get to see another side of Negan, maybe a side that the OG characters know.”
Even on the run in a hostile vision of Manhattan, Negan quickly finds himself in a familiar position as he may be the figure best suited to unite the various survivor factions in and around New York City. For Negan, a character who has used his natural charisma to get out of dangerous situations before, most notably with the vicious Whisperers in The Walking Dead, this magnetism is just something he has always fallen into as he builds cults of personality around him. Morgan has his own insight on why Negan is such a natural leader in the post-apocalyptic world.
“It just comes supernatural,” Morgan smiles. “I think that Negan has a way with people and he’s good at reading people. Because of that, he’s able to sometimes charm them, sometimes manipulate them. I talk about this a lot, about Negan being a chess player and always being a move or two ahead, but this season I feel like we find him in a spot that he’s never been in before. He’s a lot more vulnerable and he’s in a sticky situation, sort of needing Maggie to come save his ass, really.”
For Cohan, she feels as though Maggie’s ongoing feud with Negan speaks more to the darkest aspects of her character’s soul rather than just simply being a matter of Maggie refusing to forgive the man who murdered her husband. For Negan himself, Morgan feels he has been on his current trajectory for a long time and isn’t interested in achieving a genuine sense of redemption. With this in mind, Morgan feels a partnership between Negan and Maggie would make for a “powerful duo” but doubts that such a lasting alliance can come to pass as Negan goes his own way.
“People like to call it this redemption arc,” Morgan observes. “I’m not sold on the redemption arc of it all. I think you’re a certain way in this apocalyptic world and, with what you’ve done to survive, it’s hard for anyone to redeem themselves.”
With Hershel still at the mercy of the violent Burazi faction and the Dama (Lisa Emery), Maggie and Negan will have to learn how to work together if they ever hope to rescue Maggie’s son. With months to go until The Walking Dead: Dead City makes its triumphant return on AMC for its second season, fans wait with baited breath to see if such coexistence between the deeply entrenched characters will ever work out.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 premieres in 2025 on AMC.
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