Today,
The Walking Dead season eleven comes to AMC+ with a linear premiere following next Sunday on AMC. At the start of the season, those in Alexandria struggle to refortify the town and feed all the survivors. Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and her new group the Wardens, along with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Alden (Callan McAuliffe), and a few others, go off in search of food, while unbeknownst to the others, Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), and Princess (Paola Lázaro) are being held by the solders of a new and mysterious group.
In preparation of the premiere, McDermitt, Payton, Matsuura, and McAuliffe recently talked to media about the new season.
The actors talked to Jamie Ruby of SciFi Vision about people making decisions for the group and how it can affect the individuals. When it comes to Eugene’s group, Ezekiel, Yumiko, and Princess agreed to continue to follow Eugene on his hunt for Stephanie, but in Maggie’s group, she made a decision that not everyone agreed with.
Matsurra thinks other characters might not have made the same choice as they did to follow Eugene. “I think that it's not an accident that this particular group is Ezekiel,Yumiko - well, we pick up Princess (Paola Lázaro) on the way, but it's like, it wasn't Maggie that was going with Eugene. It was very particular people that did go with Eugene. And I think it's because those characters…have nothing left. They were kind of like at the end of, not the end of the road, but the end of sort of their time and their function in their past community.
“So, like for Yumiko, she'd just come out of a breakup. All of her group had kind of dispersed and gone off to do other things, and Eugene's going off on this mission, and [she] was like, ‘I'll come. I'll come; I've got I've got nothing to lose.’ So, it was more about a personal motivation, whereas, you know, I think for Callan's group…the temperature of that mission was a little different, and there's a lot more people with clashing ideas. Whereas with us, we were kind of all on a unified mission to go out and just see what's out there and find something better.”