Emily Kinney Explains Why Her ‘Walking Dead’ Return in ‘Dead City’s Alt-Reality Episode ‘Felt Natural’

Emily Kinney‘s Beth Greene is back! Or, well, she was back for a few minutes of airtime on the latest episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead: Dead City, “Genesis.”

Beth returned for the third season’s alternate-reality episode, as Maggie’s (Lauren Cohan) little sister, who in this reality, is trying to make it as a musician in the Big Apple. Beth meets up with Maggie — freshly flown in from their Georgia family farm — and tries to help her big sis make some massive decisions about her life. Maggie wants to hold onto the farm, turn it into a co-op, even. But free-spirit Beth wants Maggie to chase her own happiness.

It’s only fitting then that Kinney, a musician in real life, immediately jumped into how getting asked to come back to this world (albeit, a zombie-free one) felt a little bit like kismet.

“I have sort of a weird story,” she says with a laugh. “I wasn’t ready to record my next album, but I was like, ‘Oh, I really want to record something.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? Everyone always asks for all the songs from Walking Dead.’ And this is like 10 years after I’ve left the show. And so I randomly recorded ‘Hold On’ and ‘Struggling Man,’ these songs I sang in the show.”

She sent the recordings to The Walking Dead Universe’s Chief Content Officer Scott M. Gimple, “And he wrote back like, ‘This very well might be important,’ or something sort of cryptic like that,” she recalls. “And I did go in my head, that’s weird that he didn’t just say, ‘Oh, these are cool. Maybe we’d use them for something.’ You know what I mean? And then it was just a couple weeks later that they asked me. I could have recorded them five years ago or during the pandemic when I was bored, but for whatever reason, I was like, ‘Today’s the day I’m going record all these songs.'”

Of course for Kinney, Beth being a musician also “felt very natural,” she tells us. “It also felt very true to who Beth was. She loved music and singing and was a very creative person. Even in how we dressed her in those early seasons…she’s just a very artistic soul. And so, the idea that she would leave the farm as an adult and live in New York and go that route felt very true to her.”

Meanwhile, Maggie’s journey in the episode, trying to figure out what to do next with the family farm, while true to her personality, showed that the older Greene sister wasn’t being true to herself. Kinney says that reuniting with Cohan, whom she hasn’t acted alongside since 2014, but still runs into at Dead conventions, was “very easy.” “We both said it felt like, in some ways, no time had passed,” she continues. “She’s always been such a great scene partner. And it doesn’t feel like we have to really work, or muscle. She’s just such a good listener, and it has always felt like we were kind of like sisters.”

Now that she’s guest starred on Dead City, might the TWD powers-that-be find an excuse to reunite Beth with her old pal Daryl (Norman Reedus) on Daryl Dixon? “I mean, maybe. I don’t know,” admits Kinney. “I love this idea of a different timeline where the apocalypse hasn’t happened. So if it was something working into that whole other timeline, yeah. I think that’s cool.”

The Walking Dead: Dead City, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC and AMC+