“I just wanted to kill him,” says the actress.
“I wanted Maggie to just shoot him.”
Warning: This article contains spoilers about Sunday’s “Archeron Part II” ofThe Walking Dead.
Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan on ‘The Walking Dead’.Josh Stringer/AMC
So did the woman playing Maggie.
(Or… maybe not!)
(Also read ourepisode Q&A with Josh McDermitt.)
Lauren Cohan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Seth Gilliam on ‘The Walking Dead’.Josh Stringer/AMC
What do you make of that distinction, Lauren?
LAUREN COHAN:I just wanted to kill him.
I wanted to kill him.
I wanted Maggie to just shoot him.
There’s a tiny little thread of like, “I got to keep that alive.
I got to keep this respect for life alive.”
Does that excuse his actions then?
You should just hate him for this moment when he leaves Maggie to die.
And then when he says, “She just said she was going to kill me.
And it’s like, everybody in this world who is still alive is pretty wily.
You know what I mean?
You have to just sort of tiptoe through just getting yourself alive for a little bit longer.
You have to just keep yourself alive.
You have to adjust.
You have to just keep adjusting.
And at every juncture Negan has just done what he thinks is going to work for that much longer.
And she says that he knows the city, blah, blah, blah.
But it’s not just that he knows the city.
It almost seems like a problem with no good solutions.
We ended up doing one like that.
And both people have done what they perceive to have been necessary to survive.
We see that there’s commonality in some ways.
And that that’s something that Maggie definitely doesn’t want to acknowledge.
It’s so complicated.
That’s why there’s a whole season about it.
That’s why we’re spending 24 episodes on it, because people are not straightforward.
And she says she lost something in that moment.
What is it that she lost?
And she’s on the road with her child.
Because them being alive means that there’s food and that’s all that matters.
Having the wherewithal to make decisions from a place of anything more than survival is such a luxury.
And it’s bigger and more important than her anger at Negan, honestly.
So how does that help inform her decision on what to do with Negan moving forward?
And I’m so glad that it clarifies that for her.
It’s that sometimes you’re gonna wanna lose almost everything.
