The Walking Dead’s Longest Beef Is Finally Coming to an End
Maggie and Negan will put the past behind them in the third season of The Walking Dead: Dead City.
Maggie Rhee has been trying and failing to get her revenge on Negan Smith for a long time on The Walking Dead, but it seems that the upcoming third season of Dead City will finally see the pair properly bury the hatchet over the brutal, iconic murder of her husband Glenn.
In a new interview with EW, Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who continue to play Maggie and Negan in AMC’s popular Walking Dead spinoff, have confirmed that the duo’s beef is about to come to an end. Though the first two seasons of the show saw an uneasy alliance form between them, the anger that has consumed Maggie since Negan needlessly killed Glenn has often boiled over into mistrust and violence against her baseball bat-wielding nemesis. Now, the creators of Dead City have sensed that it’s time for Maggie to put the past behind her.
“We needed this relationship to move on between Maggie and Negan,” said Morgan. “And I was desperate for it. Negan kept doing things like saving her, saving her kid, and yet she just hated me. I just think we all were ready to move on. It’s not just gonna be, ‘I’m gonna kill you when I get the chance,’ you know?”
Cohan added, “It’s the biggest turning over of a new leaf for Maggie and Negan that there’s ever been. Because they’re gonna work together. It’s been sort of hinted at, strived for, maybe attempted, and this is the first time it’s legitimately happening.”
Morgan stressed that this would not be a romantic relationship, but a friendship that’s been a long time coming for a relentlessly unhappy Maggie, noting that he was taken aback while filming the season’s premiere when he saw her smiling. “It was the first time that we had a scene that didn’t end with her threatening my life or stabbing me or something. It was a pleasant change.”
“If I’m not gonna kill him, I gotta live with him and I have to see him for who he really is,” Cohan explained. “And that involves a lot of healing for both their relationship and for her personally. The thing that’s different this year is her vulnerability of saying, ‘I need your help.’ And that’s something she’s never tried with him. She’s coerced him and manipulated him into helping her, and he’s done it either knowingly or unknowingly to repay a debt, but this is the first time that she’s led with more openness with him.”
Dead City season 3 will also feature an episode set in an alternate reality, EW reported, with Aimee Garcia (Lucifer) and Jimmi Simpson (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) joining the cast in the real timeline as “flip sides” to Maggie and Negan that may give them an idea of how their lives may have turned out had they gone down different paths.
The Walking Dead: Dead City season 3 premieres July 26 on AMC and AMC+.