Lauren Cohan on her new show, ‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’

There’s something special about New York City just before dawn, says Lauren Cohan. “It’s a different kind of beauty, empty and desolate. You get the romance of your own relationship with the city.”

Cohan’s new Manhattan-set show is bathed in that sort of ambient desolation — except it’s less due to the hour, and more because most of the city’s inhabitants are now flesh-eating zombies. 

AMC’s “The Walking Dead: Dead City,” premiering June 18, represents a new day for Cohan’s character, Maggie Rhee.

The farm girl who became, over 11 seasons, an indomitable walker-killing mom and onetime leader of the Hilltop Colony, is venturing into NYC with Negan (former Alexa cover star Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the reformed baseball bat-wielding maniac and killer of Maggie’s husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun).

It’s an inspired pairing, and things are gonna be awkward: In the “Walking Dead” finale, Maggie tells an apologetic Negan she can never forgive him.

For a performer who’s spent more than a decade steeped in fictional death and destruction — yes, the walking dead on the show can be metaphorical, but also, there’s a lot of killing — Cohan really comes alive talking about the experience.

She brings the same level of physical and emotional ferocity to “Dead City,” so decompression between shoots is key.  

Cohan joins me on Zoom from her family’s place in south New Jersey, hair pulled back, wearing a fluffy, very un-Maggie-like sweater. “When I’m here,” she says, “I always make the trips longer than they need to be.”

Now 41, Cohan was born in Cherry Hill, but moved with the family to England, her mother’s native country, in her early teens.

She’s got the British accent to show for it — which may come as a surprise given her Southern twang on “TWD” — but she’s always glad to be back in Jersey.

And Jersey was where much of this six-episode “Dead City” chapter in the “Walking Dead” saga was shot.

Its plot revolves around Maggie’s mission into the isolated, zombie-overrun New York to rescue her now-teen son, Hershel (Logan Kim), kidnapped by a baddie known as the Croat (Zeljko Ivanek).

Maggie, the Everywoman who became a fierce leader, must keep fighting for her loved ones, while somehow holding onto her humanity. “For me, there’s this emotional component,” Cohan says. Juxtaposed with the action and mayhem is “all the vulnerability that’s involved in these characters’ lives,” she tells me. “That’s something I take seriously, and I do really feel lucky to have been able to do this for this long.”

Maybe more than any other character on the massively popular “TWD,” Maggie embodies the dramatic, often traumatic, changes required to survive in harrowing circumstances.

From the moment she joined the show in its second season, Cohan’s performance was a master class in how to imbue survivalism with grit, charm and humor.

In one of her earliest episodes, she matter-of-factly seduces Glenn amid the looted remains of a pharmacy, a sexy reminder of how life goes on even amidst the end of civilization.

But for someone who steadily rose to become one of the show’s major stars, Cohan is eager to share the spotlight with everyone bringing this terrifying dystopia to life on-screen. “I don’t want to be a star,” she says. “If there’s a world where I can work, and be part of a team, and never get all the credit and never have all the responsibility, that would be a happy life.”

As much as it’s rewarding to see the new series premiering, the real value, says Cohan, is being in the moment on set. “It’s the doing of the thing,” she says. “That’s the gratifying part. And getting to work with good people. You all have something that you’re trying to achieve, and it’s a unified vision.”

Cohan’s graduated to executive producer on “Dead City,” and she happily nerds out talking about learning the behind-the-scenes ropes.

“I was invited to be involved as much as I liked in post-production, which is really where I dive in and get super excited,” she says. “I love watching editors work. I’ve shadowed directors a number of times. And I love just being involved in the minutiae of every creative decision. You know, how the prop master comes up with a functional but cool weapon that will make people say ‘wow!’ but also that suits the character. I’ve been able to be there and learn and be part of the conversation. It’s just a huge learning curve.”

As settings go, apocalyptic New York is a juicy one.

Few cities have been fictionally decimated as frequently and colorfully — think: the Statue of Liberty in the sand in “Planet of the Apes,” or the frozen skyscrapers of “The Day After Tomorrow.” “Dead City” leans into that tradition with relish.

“‘Escape From New York’ was a definite reference,” says Cohan, referring to the 1981 John Carpenter sci-fi thriller in which a young Kurt Russell must fight his way out of a futuristic prison-colony in Manhattan.

“Dead City” sees a New York overcome with walkers, and cut off from the rest of the country. “Being in a city as populated as Manhattan makes for big hordes of walkers,” says Cohan, “that have to be corralled in different ways.”

Our heroes (and anti-heroes) are beset by a more quotidian source of horror, too: In a scene that’ll send chills down the spine of any apartment-dweller, Maggie and Negan are overcome by a swarm of cockroaches while hiding from walkers.

Thankfully, the roaches were the CGI kind. And Cohan was on hand to witness the digital bug magic. “That was a fun one to watch in post-production,” she says. “The augmentation in the sound of the legs, their shells scuttling together.” There was an initial discussion about which vermin would be most disturbing. “I think there was a time when we thought about doing it with rats,” she says. “But it was so much more insidious for it to be roaches.” 

When it comes to the significant physical demands of the role, Cohan is an old pro at this point — and due to a back injury she sustained a decade ago in a car accident, she has to be extra careful about maintaining a strong body that will protect her during her frequent action scenes.

“You have to just take extra care so you can do things right,” she says. On “Dead City,” she has a stunt double named Dejay Roestenberg whose praises she sings enthusiastically; but she also does some of her own stunts, including crossing a narrow beam (while harnessed, but still) 25 feet in the air.

She “definitely was hyperventilating” beforehand, she told Entertainment Weekly.

Cohan’s emphatic that a workout has to be about feeling good in your body, not about metrics. “I was a sporty kid,” she says, “but I was never a person who went to the gym. A gym routine became something that was part of the job for me, but I feel like it only really had success when I sort of dialed it back into the mental fitness. If it’s results-oriented, I’m just going to eventually burn out. For me it’s like, OK, I turn up for myself this many times a week. It’s the preparation to be flexible for life.”

Of the many workouts she does to keep things interesting, Cohan’s favorite is dancing.

On her own, a la that Robyn song. “I’m doing it just for the pure joy,” Cohan says. “You can do it anywhere. I just dance until I’m dripping with sweat. I never have any injuries if I’m dancing every day.”

She also pounded the pavement while shooting the first part of “Dead City” in Manhattan. “I would just walk the length of it, walk like 20 miles on a weekend, because you can. It’s so restorative.” In the Hamptons, where we shot Cohan, she gravitates to Montauk, preferably during the off-season, to walk: “I like hikes on the beach, and just finding all the quiet spots. I like cozy little coves.” You won’t find her sunbathing — “I’m trying to take care of my skin!” — or surfing. “I did it one time, like 15 years ago, And the whole time I was so aware of whether I was going to fall off or the surfboard was going to hit me in the head!”

But she does relish an opportunity to wear floaty, fun fashions like the beachwear she models for us.

It’s a relatively new feeling, letting herself just enjoy days like this. “For the longest time, I had a resistance to what I considered the superfluous parts of the job,” she muses. “And I think I didn’t let myself have fun. Or I thought that I wasn’t serious if I was having fun.”

Now she’s hoping there’ll be more “Dead City” premieres to dress up for, down the road. “We’re definitely set up to go beyond [the first season],” she says. “The TV landscape is a little different and a little more trepidatious than it used to be. But we’re really hoping the show does well and can lead to a second and third and fourth or fifth season. We feel like we’ve just cracked open the egg — now we should make an omelet.”

Photographer: Ben Watts; Editor: Serena French; Stylist: Anahita Moussavian; Photo Editor: Jessica Hober; Fashion Assistants: Madeleine Shepherd; Alycen Humphrey-Case; Hair: Seiji Yamada at Forward Artists using Trim New York; Makeup: Mary Wiles at Walter Schupfer Management; Location: Hero Beach Club, Montauk