An awful lot of awful things happen on The Walking Dead in any given season, and some of those moments have stuck out as being that much darker than everything else. One particular scene is like that for Lauren Cohan, who plays Maggie, and the actress says that it caused her to want to leave the show. Here’s how she put it.
The script where Maggie has to give the character Lori a C-section to save the baby that becomes baby Judith…I go two doors down and I knock on Steven (Yeun)’s door, and I said, ‘I have to leave the show. I don’t think I can do it.’ It affects you so deeply to the core to touch on, to dive into some of this material. And then I realized that’s why I have to do it.
The scene she’s referring to comes from the Season 3 episode “Killer Within,” in which the very pregnant Lori goes into labor while on the run at the prison, and her blood loss forces Maggie’s hand to deliver the baby. Lori dies immediately, and Carl then takes it upon himself to shoot her corpse, thus guaranteeing she wouldn’t return as a walker. It’s a dark and depressing set of scenes no matter how you look at it, and it’s somewhat understandable that it was more than Lauren Cohan thought she was getting herself into by joining The Walking Dead a season before.
Cohan will be appearing with a select group of cast members, as well as Scott Gimple and Robert Kirkman, on the Bravo series Inside the Actor’s Studio, where many top-notch thespians have put their emotions on display. She went on to explain that, as horrible as some of the things on the show can be, real life can often be just as bad, so trying to avoid a fictional version of it would be pretty futile. Such a realist way of looking at things, as if she was actually living in the post-apocalypse.
That scene would be even more emotionally frazzling if it happened in an upcoming episode, as Maggie is currently pregnant with Glenn’s baby. The two still haven’t reconnected since he went on his whole “I’m gonna die, no wait, I’m not!” side trip, and their rekindling is sure to be an emotional one.
Check out Cohan delivering the answer herself in the clip below.
It’s great to see Lauren Cohan getting more press for The Walking Dead. Her character becomes very important in the comics after the group expands their horizons, and I hope the same thing happens on the show.
The Walking Dead will return for what will hopefully be a C-section-free midseason premiere on Sunday, February 14, on AMC, while the show’s Inside the Actors Studio episode is set to hit Bravo on Thursday, February 11. To see when everything else is returning over the next few months, check out our midseason TV schedule.
