The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan Names Most Emotional Scene: “It Was the Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done as an Actor”

The Walking Dead star Lauren Cohan recounts filming the death scene of Maggie’s husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun), saying it was the “hardest thing [she’s] ever done as an actor.” In season 7 premiere “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” Glenn and a pregnant Maggie are among the survivors captured and forced to kneel when Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) subjugates the group led by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). When Daryl (Norman Reedus) strikes Negan for bludgeoning Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) to death with barbwire-wrapped baseball bat Lucille after a game of eeny-meeny-miny-moe, Negan punishes the group by turning his “vampire bat” on Glenn.

“As difficult as it is to pick any scene as the hardest or the most emotional for Maggie, or for Lauren on The Walking Dead, I would say it would be when Glenn was killed by Negan,” Cohan said in a virtual interview with FOX TV UK. “On every level, on a physical and just a completely shackled, impossible circumstance, it was the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done as an actor.”

Watching Glenn beaten to death in front of her is “definitely the hardest thing that Maggie has gone through,” Cohan added.

The horror of the scene didn’t end with Abraham and Glenn’s deaths. Both Morgan and former series star Chandler Riggs, who played Carl Grimes up through the eighth season, noted the creative team filmed additional death scenes — including one that sees Negan bring Lucille down on the head of a pregnant Maggie.

Similar death blows were recorded for other actors and did appear in the episode as what-if visions experienced by a deeply shaken Rick Grimes, but it was a low-quality version of Maggie’s fakeout death that leaked online the night before the episode premiered in October 2016.

Christian Serratos, who plays Rosita, also identified the episode as challenging when she recalled how the outdoors night shoot caused many of her cast mates to fall ill.

“It was the most challenging but also the most rewarding for, I think, all of us. It was very cold, it was very emotionally exhausting. A lot of us got physically sick,” Serratos said during a convention appearance in 2018. “I got a cold, my immune system was just shot from just expelling everything that I had. But I think it ended up like one of the best deaths.”

Cohan reunites with Serratos and Morgan in the all-new season 10 bonus episodes currently in production for an early 2021 start on AMC. She’s back full-time and part of the eleventh and final season of The Walking Dead, which spans two years with a 24-episode season launching later in 2021.

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. The Walking Dead returns with new episodes early next year on AMC.