“Walking Dead”’s Emily Kinney on Beth’s Surprise Return 11 Years Later (Exclusive)

“Even though a lot of time had passed, I felt like I fit right in,” Kinney tells PEOPLE of reprising her The Walking Dead character

Warning: There are spoilers ahead for The Walking Dead: Dead City.

NEED TO KNOW

• Emily Kinney reprises her role as Beth in a what-if episode of Dead City that imagines life without the zombie apocalypse
• “I started reading and immediately started crying,” Kinney tells PEOPLE of reading the script
• Kinney says she also collaborated on the episode’s music, singing one of her original songs that ties into Maggie’s storyline

Beth is back in The Walking Dead universe! Sort of.

In the Sunday, Aug. 30 episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City, the series imagines a world in which Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) never lived through the zombie apocalypse. The what-if episode also reunited Maggie with her sister Beth (Emily Kinney), whose character was killed off AMC’s flagship series over a decade ago in season five.

“It was so fun,” Kinney tells PEOPLE of returning to the role she said goodbye to in 2014. “Even though a lot of time had passed, I felt like I fit right in. The whole thing felt like a celebration.”

The actress, 41, says the offer to reprise her character came as a complete surprise, despite becoming pretty close friends with Walking Dead chief content officer Scott M. Gimple over the years. 

“I had actually been in touch with Scott quite a bit, and he was being very cryptic. He didn’t mention it at all,” says Kinney, who first announced her return to the TWD universe alongside Cohan during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con in July. “I really had no idea.”

“My agents and managers asked if they could send the script and if I was interested. I started reading and immediately started crying,” she continues, saying she was intrigued by the idea of revisiting a different iteration of Beth. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, of course I’m gonna do this. This is so cool.’” 

In Dead City’s alternate reality, Beth is an aspiring singer living in New York City as Maggie visits her from their Georgia farm to watch her perform in the evening. The Walking Dead previously established her character as a guitar player and singer who often used music to help keep morale high among the survivors.

Kinney, who is also a musician and songwriter, says it was easy to slip back into the role, as it’s never really left her after all these years. 

“I’ve always still felt really connected to Beth and to The Walking Dead universe,” Kinney says. “I’m always going to these comic book conventions, and people are always asking me about it …. That’s something I’m always revisiting, so it was a pretty easy process.”

“I feel like we set up who Beth was—being a singer, more artistic—so many years ago,” she continues. “When we got together in this alternate timeline, it was pretty easy to think about who she would be in her 30s, and if the zombie apocalypse hadn’t happened.”

For longtime Walking Dead fans, the sisters’ onscreen reunion delivers an especially rewarding moment that eagle-eyed viewers may have missed.

NEED TO KNOW

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When Beth died in season five of TWD, it was moments before Maggie was able to find her missing sister and hold her. So when the sisters first meet up at NYC’s Central Park and embrace on Dead City, it’s a hug that’s more than 11 years in the making.

“I don’t know if they were specifically calling back to season five, but yeah, I think it is a hug that never got to happen,” Kinney says of the embrace between Beth and Maggie. “I know for me, and for the character, it was really satisfying to be able to see my sister …. When we got separated in the zombie apocalypse, I never got to have that reunion. So it was very satisfying.”

“I love working with Lauren,” she adds of reuniting with Cohan. “I feel like doing scenes with her has always been so easy. She’s such a great listener and scene partner. It’s always been easy to do more emotional scenes with her. It’s always felt very easy for her to be my sister on screen.”

The reunion was just as meaningful for Cohan, who says bringing Kinney back let both the characters and fans find some closure for Beth after all these years.

“It’s particularly special and potent because you never see these characters have a chance to grieve,” Cohan, 44, tells PEOPLE in a separate interview. “You almost get to grieve Beth even more because you’re celebrating her in the episode, knowing, just imagining, what Beth might’ve done.”

And when Beth finally does sing near the episode’s end, viewers briefly hear Kinney perform a snippet of one of her own original songs, “Reasons to Stay Alive” — an idea Kinney pitched herself.

“The song I sing before the Christmas song is my song,” says Kinney. “In the script it had just said, ‘Beth sings a folk song.’ Once I agreed to [return], we met with the showrunner [Seth Hoffman] and the music composer, Ian [Hultquist], and were like, “Okay, well, what song should she be singing?” And I was like, “Well, I would like to pitch my song” because it seemed so perfect.”

“It was in my head immediately when I was reading the script,” she continues. “They only show the very end of it, but if you read the lyrics, it goes along with what Maggie’s going through [in the episode] with a divorce and running out of money for the farm. It seemed to just go perfectly with the episode.”

While the episode serves as a homecoming for Beth, Kinney reveals the Dead City episode wasn’t the first time she had heard discussions about potentially returning to the TWD universe.

“No one had really mentioned it to me, but I do know that both [showrunner] Seth [Hoffman] and Scott—when they’re pitching ideas—it had come up several different times throughout the years: ‘How would we incorporate Beth again?’” Kinney recalls. “I know that idea has been floating around.”

Kinney says there were also discussions of bringing her back to the original Walking Dead series before it wrapped its 11-season run in 2022.

“When we were approaching the season finale of the original Walking Dead, I remember there being a little bit of …. would there be a way to get a bunch of the old cast members back in more of a dream sequence type of way?” Kinney recalls. “I don’t think it ever really panned out. But I remember [TWD showrunner] Angela [Kang] reaching out and gauging people’s interest and availability. This was the first time it was an actual solid offer.”

“It’s kind of nice that it wasn’t just a dream or something,” she adds of her guest-star appearance on Dead City.

As for whether or not we could see more of TWD’s alternate reality down the line, Cohan teases, “I don’t think anything’s off the table.”

While there’s no word on whether or not we could see Kinney return to Dead City or another corner of TWD in the future, she is currently working on new music, including an EP that’s inspired by her time on The Walking Dead called I Cried When You Died, out Sept. 18.

“That’s what everyone says to me when they see me at the airport or something,” Kinney says, referring to fans’ reactions to Beth’s death. “It kind of became a thing with my friends.”

“It’s funny because I did not know I was getting this offer when I made it,” Kinney says of the TWD music, which she sent to Gimple as well in case they “were useful” in the TWD universe. “I wasn’t ready to start my next album yet. And I was talking with my friend, Ben, who produces a lot of my stuff, and we were like, ‘Let’s record those songs. Everyone asks for them.’ So I randomly just recorded “Struggling Man,” “Hold On” — all the songs Beth sang in the show.”

The EP will also include a song called “Steven’s Weed,” named for The Walking Dead‘s Steven Yeun, who famously played Maggie’s husband Glenn Rhee before being brutally killed off the show in 2016. Kinney says the track is about “a time I smoked a little bit too much of Steven’s weed.” 

Beyond Dead City, Kinney’s next original album, A Bright Green Dot of Hope, will be released next year, and Kinney will also return to acting in what she describes as a “spooky rom-com.” 

“We’ll see what’s next,” says Kinney, thankful to the fans who continue to show their support long after Beth’s story came to an end on TWD. “You do so much work as an actor and a writer that people never see—so many auditions people never see. The way that fans from Walking Dead have taken in my music or gone to TV shows I’ve been a part of and have become an audience for my work is so lucky and so special. I’m really grateful for that.”

The Walking Dead: Dead City airs new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+.

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