Spoilers ahead for The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3.
The Walking Dead was a wildly popular series during its original run on AMC, and it's still regularly re-watched by folks with a Netflix subscription. The franchise has stayed alive (pun intended) thanks to a series of spinoffs, including Dead City. That series recently turned for its third season on the network (and streaming with an AMC+ subscription), and the most recent episode saw Emily Kinney return as Beth for the first time in over a decade. And the actress recalled the emotional reaction she had to returning.
Beth's death in The Walking Dead Season 5 shocked fans at the time, who were disappointed to see her go so unceremoniously. But Kinney finally got to return as Beth in the latest episode of Dead City, where Maggie imagines what New York might be like if the zombie apocalypse never happened. While speaking with People about her long-awaited return to the franchise, she actress revealed her original reaction by saying:
My agents and managers asked if they could send the script and if I was interested. I started reading and immediately started crying. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, of course I’m gonna do this. This is so cool.’
Honestly, can you blame her? Emily Kinney was clear about how hard it was to end her tenure on TWD, which required her to move away from the friends and collaborators she'd worked with for years. She also spoke about the difficulty of watching The Walking Dead, so this is no doubt a full circle moment. Especially since it's been so long since Beth's death on the flagship series.
So what was it like returning with her onscreen sister Lauren Cohan all this time? Later in the interview she expressed how surprisingly easy it was to step back into Beth's shoes for this dream sequence. As she put it:
It was so fun. Even though a lot of time had passed, I felt like I fit right in. The whole thing felt like a celebration.
Despite how painful it was to be killed off of The Walking Dead, it sounds like the years away from the apocalyptic series helped her gain enough perspective that it was easy to slip back into character for Dead City Season 3. We'll just have to wait and see if she ends up having any other cameos as we get deeper into the current batch of episodes.
In this dream sequence from Episode 6 "Genesis", Maggie is shown meeting up with Beth at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Kinney's character moved to New York City to pursue her musical dreams in this alternate universe, while Maggie stayed home at Hershel's farm. In the conversation with People, Kinney reacted to Beth's fate in this sequence, offering:
I feel like we set up who Beth was—being a singer, more artistic—so many years ago. When we got together in this alternate timeline, it was pretty easy to think about who she would be in her 30s, and if the zombie apocalypse hadn’t happened.
Beth was shown singing and playing guitar a number of times throughout her tenure on The Walking Dead, so having her being an aspiring musician in this alternate reality was a logical narrative choice. And it's one that the actress seems to put her approval behind.
The Walking Dead: Dead City airs new episodes Sundays on AMC as part of the 2026 TV schedule. We'll just have to wait and see how much this alternate universe factors into Season 3 as a whole.
