While Jeffrey now says “everyone is very excited about the respective spinoffs and what can come next,” he wasn’t always so sure how Dead City—which will follow Maggie and Negan as they travel “into a post-apocalyptic Manhattan long ago cut off from the mainland,” according to the network—would even work in the first place.
“When the idea was first pitched, I thought it was as crazy as you probably did,” he said. “How do you put these two characters together? There was a lot of talk about spinoffs and how they would do it. They were talking to Lauren and I about doing our own.”
Jeffrey continued, “One day, [The Walking Dead Universe chief content officer] Scott [Gimple] said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this idea and it’s the two of you.’ I remember I talked to Lauren the next day on set and we were both eyebrows raised going, ‘How the f–k does that work?'”
How the f–k that works, Lauren argued, is by not running away from the existential nature of Negan and Maggie’s relationship.
“It’s a good territory for us to get into as actors, but our audience is going to want to see it,” she said. “It is so much left on the table. If you’re tethered to somebody you have every reason to never want to deal with and want to hate and you have to, for me it just brings up the biggest questions you can have in life.”
