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Maggie & Me: The Walking Dead co-star Lauren Cohan shares how she came to know her character over the years to find her "inner strength"
Lauren Cohan has been playing Maggie in The Walking Dead and it's spin-off The Walking Dead: Dead City for over a decade now, so she has a pretty good idea of what makes the character tick.
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One advantage to having a show stay in the public eye for as long as The Walking Dead is that the actors get to spend a lot of time with their characters. For example, Lauren Cohan has been playing Maggie Rhee since 2011 starting in the original The Walking Dead and its spin-off The Walking Dead: Dead City. This means she knows pretty well what makes Maggie tick and has been able to use that to change her performance of the character.
“I think that it’s so rare to do something for this long and [I] have to believe that our universe and our show and our characters are resonant to the real things that people feel," Cohan said during a panel at New York Comic-Con 2024. "And I think that when you talk about being strong, what is it to be strong? We’ve seen Maggie fight in physical situations that seem insurmountable. We’ve seen her raising her son. We’ve seen her kill hordes and hordes of zombies. We’ve seen her kill other people and, at the time, thinking that these were the right choices to protect the greater good.”
However, all of that is building to Maggie’s story in The Walking Dead: Dead City, where she has to confront her own beliefs and undergo some serious changes.
“The thing that I like most about this season is that there’s an element of blinders that she has worn for a long time to get through these insane situations,” Cohan explains. “And amidst that, she has not killed one person who is the source of so much unrest. And I think that in so many ways, the best is yet to come in what it really takes to find inner strength and in constantly facing a nemesis and in trying to understand why you don’t take the easy road.”
Maggie has always been one of the strongest characters in The Walking Dead, so it isn't surprising to discover that finding a new source of strength is one of the keys to her journey throughout the franchise. Lauren Cohan has had a first-person view of that road all along.
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