Twelve years after she was killed off on The Walking Dead‘s fifth season, Beth Greene (Emily Kinney) is returning to the zombie apocalypse in the Aug. 30 episode of AMC’s spinoff The Walking Dead: Dead City.
“I never would’ve imagined that I was coming back at all,” Kinney shared in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Years ago, when The Walking Dead series was still going, I vaguely remember they were like, ‘Oh, maybe in someone’s fever dream, there’d be a thing again’…but I never would’ve imagined it, especially because now the main show was over. So I was very surprised. I had no idea. But I was excited.”
Resurrection, of course, is the franchise’s bread and butter, but Maggie’s (Lauren Cohan) little sis won’t be coming back as a shambling member of the undead. Instead, the forthcoming episode—titled “Genesis”—takes place in an alternate reality where the world never ended and Beth moved from the family farm to New York City in order to pursue her musical ambitions.
Emily Kinney on Beth’s Walking Dead Return in AMC’s Dead City Spinoff
“It just felt really natural,” Kinney told EW. “Especially working with Lauren, we’ve always just had a really natural, easy way of working together that I don’t think I’ve encountered anywhere else. Anytime we have to do anything emotional, it’s always very easy.”
What’s more, getting to see Beth flourish in this parallel universe made Kinney “really proud.”
“I feel like in this other timeline if the zombie apocalypse hadn’t happened, the fact that she was able to move on from her life on the farm and follow her dreams is great,” she continued. “And so, as an outside observer, I’m proud of her. And I resonate with it. I’m from Nebraska, and I moved to New York City when I was 19 or 20 to do music and acting, so it made sense to me.”
The script, Kinney recalled, required Beth to sing an unspecified “folk song,” which had yet to be chosen. Since she’s a musician in real life, too, the actress suggested her own track, “Reasons to Stay Alive.” The title alone fits perfectly into the Walking Dead‘s theme of survival in a world of dwindling hope.
“We had a meeting to talk with the music supervisor and different people to talk about what song. They were like, ‘Do you have any ideas?’ And I was like, ‘Well, yes, I do!'” Kinney recounted. “The lyrics matched up so perfectly to the events of the episode, so I was like, ‘You guys, I have to pitch my song.’ I played them the song, and then they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s the song!’”
Now in its third—and potentially final—season, Dead City revolves around the unlikely pairing of Maggie Greene and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as they battle their way across a zombified Manhattan. The two characters were diametrically opposed since season seven of the flagship series, when Negan beat Maggie’s husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun), to death with a baseball bat.
“Genesis” airs on AMC Sunday, Aug. 30 at 9:00 p.m. ET.
