Lauren Cohan reveals original Walking Dead: Dead City opening scene
Warning: This article contains spoilers about The Walking Dead: Dead City series debut, "Old Acquaintances."
The next phase of The Walking Dead franchise is officially underway.
The Walking Dead: Dead City premiered June 18 on AMC and AMC+, kicking off with a hell of a shot: Lauren Cohan's Maggie surveying a ravaged New York City from across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
Maggie's recon mission is interrupted, however, by a group of walkers. When one grabs her leg, she responds the only way she knows how — by bashing its brains in. And then bashing some more. And then a little bit more after that. Basically, until the head is mush.
It's a bloody and intense start to the series, but it turns out that wasn't how Dead City was originally intended to begin. "It originally opened in the bar scene," Cohan tells EW.
Peter Kramer/AMC Lauren Cohan on 'The Walking Dead: Dead City'
Ah, yes. The bar scene. It immediately follows the aforementioned head-crushing and opening title sequence, tracking Maggie as she takes out a trio of adversaries in a motel bar while looking for Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan. It's filled with action and tension, with Maggie running down Negan in her truck and placing a knife to his throat, but it couldn't establish the setting quite like a panoramic shot of the New York City skyline. Nor did it provide as clear a window into Maggie's fraught psyche at the outset of her mission.
"We wanted to better place people in the backstory of the show," explains Cohan, who also serves as an executive producer. "That was partly for people who'd been away from the show for a minute, or who had never been with the show. But also, just tonally, it felt right. And to have these very frayed strands that needed to be temporarily rerouted for the purpose of this mission. It was definitely this kind of strange catharsis."
In fact, Cohan says there's an interpretation of the scene that could ask whether it ever even happened. "I look at that scene like a bit of a dream sequence. Even after watching it again, I was like, 'Is there a world where actually that didn't happen? Where that was just this sort of like hopeful spilling of the rage and the frustration and the intangible threat?' And that puts some imagery to that feeling."
amc Lauren Cohan's Maggie holding a knife up to the throat of Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan on 'The Walking Dead: Dead City'
While the premiere began with Maggie bashing a zombie's skull, it ended with her making a pretty momentous decision. Since she'd enlisted the services of Negan in helping retrieve her son Hershel (Logan Kim) from the evil clutches of the Croat (?eljko Ivanek), she's forced to save her former nemesis when he finds himself in the crosshairs of Armstrong, a lawman played by Gaius Charles. Maggie not only knocks him out, but leaves him to die in a room full of walkers.
It's a pretty shocking move by a woman who we've come to know as a hero, but Cohan says it speaks to the fact that no person in this world is simply good or bad. She credits showrunner Eli Jorné with having everyone on screen occupying that gray area.
"Eli really does this with all the characters," says Cohan. "We've put this show on the air for a long time and there's a lot of violence within the show. A lot of us understand the place these characters are in and how those moves and those actions are necessitated. These are traumatized people trotting through the world doing questionable things all of the time. I will never say that it is equal to what Negan did, but I am going to say that it's a story of these people having to almost become a zombie just to get through it, and keep the blinders up. And then it's also about a parent doing something that she thinks she has to do."
Peter Kramer/AMC Lauren Cohan on 'The Walking Dead: Dead City'
Cohan also points out some hidden symbolism in the scene that some viewers may have missed. "That is Maggie's wedding ring, and it's on a chain of blades around her neck. That's what she ultimately is able to use to slice Armstrong's face and get herself free. I think that that speaks to the tokens that have galvanized her through these years. I just really love the thoughtfulness of Eli to write stuff like that in there — from the knives in her boot to her ring and her bond to her husband as a weapon. And to the memory of that love and to the person she has left that she's here to protect — that scene had so much in it for me."
With five more episodes on deck, there's plenty to come.
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