Lauren Cohan faced scheduling shift for The Walking Dead: Dead City directorial debut

"I had a good amount of time to prep, and then all of a sudden the episode had to get pulled forward."

Lauren Cohan has now pretty much done it all on The Walking Dead. She first joined the franchise as Maggie Greene way back in season 2 of the original series. When she later signed on for the Dead City spinoff series, she added an executive producer credit to her name. And it wasn’t just a vanity credit. Cohan was deep in the weeds on planning and mapping out the first season of the zombies-take-Manhattan installment.

Now, in season 2, she is adding yet another credit to her expanding résumé — that of director. While she directed episode six of an eight-episode season (titled “Bridge Partners Are Hard to Come by These Days”), Cohan had to put on her proverbial director’s cap earlier than she anticipated due to conditions that caused a shift in the shooting schedule.

“It was like I had a good amount of time to prep, and then all of a sudden the episode had to get pulled forward,” Cohan explains to Entertainment Weekly. “Because we were shooting out of order and there were seasonal issues.”

What sort of seasonal issues, exactly? “What we used for Central Park just wouldn't bloom,” Cohan says of their filming location in the Boston area whose foliage would not cooperate due to a late blooming schedule. “And so we had to punt that episode to later in the season.”

But Dead City line producer Colin Walsh had an idea. “He said, ‘What do you think? You want to do yours sooner?’” Cohan recalls. “And I said, 'Yeah, I do!’ because there was so much anticipation and you just kind of want to get going.”

Get going she did, and if you thought the first-time director would ease in by helming a quiet episode with fewer acting responsibilities and complicated action sequences… think again. “It was pretty incredible,” Cohan says. “This past week I've been reflecting a lot about it, and I have a snapshot in my mind of almost every crew member and an awesome moment that we had. Not that there were not so many challenges, but it was just very, very rewarding.”

As for the most challenging parts of her new gig, one of them included a very complicated visual effects sequence. “It was very expensive and you have to just imagine it,” Cohan says. “And then I had to do a lot of things that I hadn't done before, so it was just a lot of late nights of staying up and working with our storyboard artist who storyboarded some really complex sequences, and then working with other director friends outside of the show.”

Cohan continues: “I think the most challenging part was really just reminding myself that I would enjoy it and to breathe. Just breathe. And so I just tried to just stay focused.”

As for her most enjoyable part of directing, it was working with her castmates in a new capacity. “Working with the actors was my favorite part of everything,” she recalls while flashing a huge grin. “The days that I wasn't acting and I was only directing and working with the actors, it was just the best summer camp.”

Suffice it to say, it won’t quite be summer camp for Maggie when Cohan’s directorial debut airs Sunday, June 8, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.