The Walking Dead star has explained the 'satisfying' but 'very stressful' role change they made for the new season of spin-off Dead City.
Lauren Cohan features in the series which is a branch off from the main show that was an adaptation of the popular comic books by Robert Kirkman. While the entire first season is currently streaming on Netflix, the second has recently began airing from May on AMC.
It is one of six Walking Dead spin-offs produced so far, including Fear The Walking Dead, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Tales of the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, and The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live.
Dead City focuses on the iconic characters of Maggie (Cohan) and Neegan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who find themselves in and around a post-apocalyptic New York City. The second series picks up a year following events of the first with warring factions fighting for control.
In an exclusive chat with Screen Time for Reach, Cohan reflected on the series return coming 15 years since the original debut of The Walking Dead on our screens.
She said: "It's such a funny thing, isn't it? When I reflect the first thing I always think of is like starting on season two of The Walking Dead, doing my audition, getting to Georgia, meeting everyone, those first days, learning my lines and then it's almost like there's this 14 and a half year gap, where I'm just here today, I'm just like oh yeah that happened. Meanwhile I was living 14 and a half years of my life."
Cohan went on to describe having seminal moments even when returning to work on Dead City as she prepared for a new role in its production. She said: "I even have (those moments) from shooting season two (of Dead City) because we had a lot of detail and I was involved on a deeper level by directing one of the episodes and that became a seminal experience in and of itself."
The actor, who has played Maggie Greene since 2011, is credited as the director for the sixth episode of Dead City season two. She explained the satisfaction and stress that came with the job.
She explained: "Being able to direct on a creative level is so satisfying because you collaborate with everyone and you get to you get to go into their world. You go into the production designers' world you go into the costume designers' world.
"A really big thing about it that I didn't know until I really did it is the way you approach as an actor can be obviously, very isolated and how you're approaching it, building a character. You get to go and collaborate with everyone. They're all doing the same kind of script analysis and so you all get to just sort of like love on the story together and it's a group thing and being in the room when you deliver a tone meeting and everybody's like, okay cool this scene is about this and how is each department going to deliver on that aspect? It's fun. It's really stressful sometimes, but it's really fun."
When asked about fan expectation all these years into the franchise and having to suddenly direct her co-stars, Cohan admitted: "I felt like the responsibility to the fans is baked in because we know it, we love it. We just don't want to get in the way of the thing we love. And the responsibility to my co-stars, working with the actors is the best part of the whole thing because we speak the language."
She continued: "When you're an actor, you know to approach your co-stars in a certain kind of way or you don't, but you wonder if they like being approached the same way you do when you're concentrating. So they've become these very quiet tender moments that you get to have in what is a melee of activity."
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