‘TWD: Dead City’ Team Talks Negan and Lucille, Lauren Cohan Directing & More in Season 2 (VIDEO)

There’s a lot to look forward to in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, coming Spring 2025 on AMC, and TV Insider spoke with the cast and The Walking Dead Universe’s Chief Content Officer Scott M. Gimple during New York Comic Con 2024 for all the surprising scoop.

In the sophomore round, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is under the control of theatrical antagonist The Dama (Lisa Emery) after making a tempting deal with her in the Season 1 finale. The Negan who fans will see in Season 2 is rejoined with his beloved barbed-wire bat, Lucille, and is definitely up to no good. “Jeffrey wears it like a beat-up leather jacket,” says Gimple of Morgan’s ability to slip back into the original Negan persona. “It’s exciting to play the hits, no pun intended,” the exec adds with a laugh.

Meanwhile, Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan) is making her way into Manhattan alongside do-gooder marshal Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles), who finally gets clarity on Maggie and Negan’s bloody history in this round. “When we finished Season 1, [Maggie and Armstrong] were not necessarily the best of friends, but this season [they’re] going to have to work together,” says Charles.

One thing is for sure: It sounds like it won’t be a happy reunion when they meet Negan again. “It’s complicated,” confirms Cohan. “Maggie has a lot of feelings that she may or may not be aware of about where Negan is, and what this favor he’s done [with The Dama] has cost him. And I think whether she’s willing to admit it, admitting what she may be willing to do for [Negan] is coming at the cost of the very tentative relationship she’s just regained with her son.”

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Cohan, who has been a part of The Walking Dead Universe since 2011, also made her directing debut this season with the sixth episode. “I definitely sought all the advice that I could,” Cohan admits. “But the confidence that I had from playing Maggie and from being in this world for a long time gave me the confidence to know the places I needed help with and needed to rely on other people for. It just made for an experience that was so much greater than the sum of its parts.”

The drama will also welcome some new faces this time around, like Sons of Anarchy‘s Kim Coates, who portrays Bruegel, the leader of one of Manhattan’s most fearsome gangs (“Coates is bigger than life, both offscreen and on,” teases Gimple), and Orange Is the New Black‘s Dascha Polanco, who plays Major Lucia Narvaez.

Check out the NYCC video interview above with Gimple, Cohan, and Charles above for more intel on the upcoming installment.