After a glitzy Monte-Carlo premiere of The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan broke down the evolution of the relationship between their characters, Negan and Maggie, and promised the upcoming season of the show breaks new ground.

“I think we played as much hate as we could over the last 10 years, and so to come at it like, we’ve now known each other longer than probably anyone else alive in this world, and for these characters to realize to survive that they need each other was a big revelation, and then [we get] to do that with a bit of a sense of humor at times as well,” Morgan said of the Negan-Maggie relationship.

Season 3 of AMC’s The Walking Dead: Dead City opened the 65th edition of Monte-Carlo TV Festival on Friday night, with the first two episodes shown as the event’s curtain-raiser on Friday night.

The day after Morgan, Lauren Cohan and producer and showrunner Seth Hoffman dished on their show. “You get to see who Maggie and Negan would have been if the apocalypse didn’t happen,” Hoffman said about Season 3.

Asked about the real-world relevance of the show, the showrunner said: “This is a season that is about immigration. This is a world where people are afraid of other people, and in this season we absolutely are asking the question: Do you need to be afraid of other people? As the season progresses, people will have different opinions on that, as people in the world have different opinions. I think it’s important to give voice to different people feeling different things.”

He continued: “The show isn’t ever going to come out and say in a definitive way, ‘here is what other people should believe.’ But this is a show that, even though it’s not set in present day, wants you after watching it, to consider the present day world.”

Cohan also shared her take on the show’s wider meaning. “Maggie says it in the first or the second episode to Renata, ‘What is there for our kids if we don’t invite people in, and if we don’t create something bigger than ourselves.’

“I’m very proud to be part of a show that has always been representative of [different] types of people and of hope in a time where you could give up and you could not have a reason to try and prevail.”

Morgan had a quickfire response: “Are you talking about the apocalypse or now?”

He added that we can expect to see a new dimension to Negan in Season 3. “He’s just gotten more layers. There always will be that person that walked out of the trailer 11 years ago, that will always be part of who Negan is, but he’s more three-dimensional now.”

He also cast his mind back to the time he joined the show: “I was doing The Good Wife at the time, and I remember having to kind of get out of that contract and go over blindly to The Walking Dead, but it was something I really wanted to do,” he said. “I can’t believe that I’m still fucking here… and doing a show with Lauren to boot.”