The Walking Dead: Dead City Clip – Negan’s New Friend Gets Weird (Exclusive)

The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 is now airing, beginning the next chapter in the saga of odd-pair survivors Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan). After some traumatic fallout at the end of Season 2, the Season 3 premiere started things off with a bang, as the battle between the Croat (Željko Ivanek) and New Babylon reached an explosive, bloody ending. The series got a soft reboot of sorts, as Negan and Maggie parted ways, and the beef between them was finally settled.

Now, Negan is off on his own journey, while Maggie is considering building her own survivor community rather than running back to the one she left. Negan has already met a new friend, but as this new clip from Season 3 Episode 2 teases, that friend is already looking a bit more… off than Negan is comfortable with.

Talk to The Walking Dead

The clip shows Negan walking with his new pal, Mason Dillard (Jimmi Simpson), a survivor who lived in an NYC apartment above a bar and has since taken to operating the bar. Like with many survivors, Mason’s sanity has clearly slipped a bit since the world fell, and he has developed a unique… quirk that, at least he believes, gives him an edge in surviving: speaking the zombie language.

Clearly, Negan is having a hard time tolerating this low-level lunacy from his new travel buddy; after all, it’s the apocalypse, and good company is understandably hard to come by. There’s already a secondary odd-pair comedy woven into this show, just watching Negan and Mason try to get along. We can only imagine if it will last, and how crazy the fallout could be, if it doesn’t.

The great thing is that with the casting of Jimmi Simpson, you don’t really know which way Mason could go as a character. Simpson is best known for his signature character acting work, playing weird or possibly sinister characters. After appearances in several big 2000s shows (24, Cold Case, Carnivále), he got a breakout recurring role (that’s still ongoing) as “Liam McPoyle,” head of the freaky Philadelphia clan The McPolyes, in the longest-running sitcom series, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

That led to bigger roles in shows like Netflix’s House of Cards, Black Mirror, Unsolved, and even vocal work in big animated shows like Star Trek: Prodigy and Star Wars: The Bad Batch. However, Simpson really gained a following with his role in the first season of HBO’s Westworld, where he played a seemingly good man who is eventually revealed to be the ruthless villain who’s been plaguing the show all along.

Simpson will also be getting an expanded role in another big show that’s returning for summer 2026: Apple TV’s Dark Matter Season 2, in which he plays a brilliant inventor whose research into multiversal travel gets put to dastardly use.

The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 is currently airing on AMC Networks and streaming on AMC+.

The Walking Dead Is Officially Starting a Multiverse, With New Series Bringing Back Dead Characters After 12 Years