The Walking Dead: Dead City Recasts Maggie’s Son Hershel

Maggie and Glenn’s son is growing up. The Walking Dead: Dead City has tapped Logan Kim (Ghostbusters: Afterlife) to play an aged-up Hershel Rhee in the Walking Dead spin-off, replacing child actor Kien Michael Spiller. The last we saw 10-year-old Hershel and mom Maggie (Lauren Cohan) in a one-year time jump ending The Walking Dead series finale, they returned to their rebuilt home at Virginia’s Hilltop Colony. The new spin-off series set in post-apocalyptic New York City will pick up years later, reuniting Maggie and enemy-turned-ally Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) for a high-stakes rescue mission when the now tween-aged Hershel is kidnapped. 

“We are a few years on [from The Walking Dead],” Cohan said during Dead City’s WonderCon panel. Series creator and showrunner Eli Jorné added the 16-year-old Kim is playing a “vaguely older” Hershel, putting him around age 12 or 13.

“I don’t know how much I can say. He’s retrieved unlawfully by some people and kidnapped-ish, and I track these people as far as I can on my own, and that happens to be to New York City,” Cohan said. “And we meet the terrible people that took him.”

That mysterious enemy group includes the “big bad” known as The Croat (Damages’ Željko Ivanek). Meanwhile, Negan is a fugitive from New Babylon lawman Perlie Armstrong (Grey’s Anatomy‘s Gaius Charles), a marshall seeking justice for the many crimes Negan committed as leader of the Saviors.

Morgan was the first to reveal Dead City would pick up years after The Walking Dead, following Maggie and Negan after they reached an uneasy détente in part because he saved her son’s life.

“I think that this spinoff is going to take place a couple of years after the Walking Dead finale, and here’s the problem with those couple of years — we don’t see what happens to these characters,” Morgan said in a recent interview. “Negan has an opportunity to fall into his old ways in these missingyears. He is very much a creature of habit, and he knows how tosurvive.”

Morgan continued: “When he was with our group there was another wayto survive, and he tried to adapt to those ways. I’m worried whateverhappens in these two years away from our group, what he will become andwho he will become. And so, when Maggie and he are together again, thechance that Negan isn’t who we see as when we leave him here on theshow. I think is a pretty good chance that he’s not going to be that guyanymore because he adapts to his surroundings and things are f-ckingrough. He’s going to go back to some old habits.”

The Walking Dead: Dead City premieres Sunday, June 18th at 10 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+ immediately following Fear the Walking Dead‘s mid-season finale. Subsequent episodes will air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.