Season three of The Walking Dead: Dead City is done and things are in a good place for Maggie, Negan, Herschel, and Luis. Their community took some major hits this season, and we got a few big deaths as well. But, in the end, Maggie and Negan are accepting the fact that they do, in fact, work well together as a leadership duo. We chatted with showrunner Seth Hoffman about the ongoing Maggie/Negan dynamic, crafting new characters, and filming Dead City’s third round.
Nerdist: Season three introduced us to some really cool characters like Dillard, Renata, and Luis. What was it like to formulate those characters and were things that you wanted to do with them that maybe you decided not to do?
Seth Hoffman: We had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted those three characters, their arcs to be this season. So no regrets about that. I think when we were beginning to think about the season, we wanted a sort of fun house mirror version of Negan for Negan to hang out with and a funhouse mirror version of Maggie for Maggie to hang out with, or cautionary tales of each of them. Because at the beginning of the season, Negan is ready to just completely abandon humanity and live off by himself because people just cause him pain. So he meets somebody who has not been around people for a very long time, and Negan learns that, “Oh no, that’s not what I want to do.”
And for Maggie, Renata is someone whose tragic flaw this season is that she cannot let go of her vengeance. She has this traumatic event happen with the Croat, and she cannot let go of wondering if Negan is going to do that. And that colors everything that she does. And ultimately, because she can’t let go of Negan, that aspect until the very, very end, it’s bad news for her. In a season where that’s what Maggie’s dealing with, we wanted to do a cautionary tale of that.
With Luis, the starting point there was we wanted Herschel to become a doctor, and Luis to serve as the mentor character. And then it was like, “Okay, we’ll make Luis and Renata sisters. We’ll make Dillard in the bar.” And then it all began to coalesce in the way that when you’re in a writer’s room with a bunch of amazing writers, it tends to do.
Love it. And what I really loved this season too was how much Maggie and Negan grew. At the beginning, everybody’s pretty dejected. Maggie is separated from her son. Negan is grieving Ginny, but he ends up in a place with Maggie where they have hope, a mutual acceptance of each other, and a deep trust. What was it like working with Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey D. Morgan in terms of trying to find this place for them? How much input did they have in terms of bringing their arcs to this place?
Hoffman: It was really important to me as soon as I got the job to talk to them. They know these characters better than anybody in the world. So really talking to them, getting a sense as to what they felt was working, what wasn’t working, and where we settled relatively quickly was that audiences fell in love with both of these characters. They fell in love with this farm girl who was just this bright light in seasons two, three, and four of the mothership [show], but whose light, understandably, after the death of her father, then her sister, then her husband, really dimmed. So the challenge was how do we have Maggie rediscover that light?
For Negan and Jeffrey, it was the first conversation we had. I was like, “Jeffrey, what do you want out of this season?” He’s like, “When Negan comes on screen, I don’t want anybody to know what the f**k he’s going to do.” Because that’s who he was in season seven and eight of the original show, and then he was in prison. [In Dead City] he was under the thumb of the Dama and the Croat. So how do we get him back to where he was? There was obviously some work we had to do in the first couple of episodes to reset those characters, but once they were reset, it was just full steam ahead.
For sure. From a writing and production standpoint, what were some of the more challenging scenes to try to parse through, and why did they feel like a challenge?
Hoffman: From a writing standpoint, the way I work, I kind of get the big picture, then I start filling it in and then fill it in a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And having an amazing writing staff who I was really thrilled to be able to trust to come up with great original stuff. And I think all of us were really interested in pushing the boundaries of what a Walking Dead episode or scene could be. So in the writing process, there was just a lot of joy, really. And similarly with production, I mean, there were complicated scenes. I think about the chandelier dropping in episode two.
It’s a complicated thing to be able to do because so many departments are involved in that one thing that you only get one take of. So a lot of planning goes into it, but everybody was excited to work together and help this vision come to life, and it was great. I’ll say I’m really proud of the creativity this season.
I’m really proud of how the season turned out, but I’m also proud that on the last day on set, a lot of the crew came up to me and said “A lot of times when a season’s ending, I’m so relieved because it’s been so difficult on a lot of levels, but I’m really sad that this season’s ending because I’ve had such a great time.” And there are so many people responsible for creating that environment, certainly foremost among them, Colin Walsh, who’s another executive producer on the show.
But to be able to have a season that was both really creatively satisfying, but also really personally satisfying for the amazing creative people that were involved in it, you can’t ask for more than that!