Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan in ‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’

Beware: AMC’s “The Walking Dead: Dead City” season 3 is coming. And perhaps the best yet.

“This is by far our best season. This is such a different relationship now,” Jeffrey Dean Morgan said Saturday at the Monte Carlo TV Festival, after premiering the first two episodes at the festival opening the night before.

On Saturday, Morgan, showrunner Seth Hoffman and Lauren Cohan met with reporters at the festival to talk about Maggie and Negan, who are still trying to survive while navigating post-apocalyptic Manhattan.

“Negan was a great villain and now he just has more layers,” Morgan said. “He will always be the person who walked out of a trailer 11 years ago, but he is more multi-dimensional. This year there has been such a change in their relationship that a different side of him is coming out.”

“That’s why I want to play it. It’s still new to me every year. Who would do a series with two enemies who wanted to kill each other? And yet here we are.”

According to Cohan, grief “defined” Maggie. But now things are changing a bit.

“This is really the first year where Maggie realizes that being defined by sadness no longer serves her. It started in Season 2 with her son – she knew something had to change, which was very uncomfortable. There is something bigger: a bigger purpose.”

“We are these unlikely allies who realize how much they can rely on each other and how much they know each other. The irony of their relationship, with how they met, is interesting.”

Morgan agreed: “We’ve spent the last ten years expressing as much hate as we can. Now we’ve known each other longer than anyone else. To survive, they need each other, and that was a big revelation. Seeing Maggie laugh was so much fun – I haven’t seen it in ten years!”

“It was great to have scenes with real meaning and depth. We saw new sides of each other. She didn’t even stab me once!”

Hoffman opened up about the alternate reality episode.

“I hope I can look at this show from a fan’s perspective, and there was one thing they wanted to see: characters we may not have seen in a long time.”

He added: “You get to see who Maggie and Negan would have been if the apocalypse hadn’t happened. Despite the horrible trauma and all the things they’ve done, you can ask the question: are they better off having lived through a zombie apocalypse?”

Is the show relevant given what’s happening today, including in the US?

“Maggie is very afraid in the early episodes that bad things will happen when strangers come to her community. All she can think about is the bad side of what that could bring. With Negan’s help, she begins to understand that bringing people to life brings people into the community. We are aware that not everyone in the US has that idea,” said Hoffman.

“This season, as we look forward, we’re going to ask that question.”

They also explore ‘male loneliness’.

“They’re struggling to find connection. This is also a season about immigration. They’re not going from country to country, but this is a world where people are afraid of other people. We ask, ‘Do we have to?’ As the season goes on, people will have different opinions on that. And that also applies to the public.”

Cohan noted: “Also [the idea of] choosing to have a child is the ultimate sign of hope. Hope in time you could give it up.”

Yet some things remain exactly the same: Negan’s iconic baseball bat is crucial to him, even if its batteries die.

“Lucille is Lucille. It’s the only prop I’ve ever had as an actor that I really love. It changes my attitude and the way I talk. I’m not really Negan, I know it’s a shock, but she defined this character for me.”

While some characters don’t make it in this universe — “We’ve lost a lot of people on this show and you never get good at losing them,” Morgan noted — they still want to push some boundaries and “do things you haven’t seen before,” Hoffman said.

“This season we’re exploring the humanity of the Walkers. We have returning Walker characters with names and personalities to some extent. We also want people to think, ‘This is still ‘The Walking Dead,’ but it’s also brand new.'”

“The way I work, and not all showrunners work this way, is that it’s uncomfortable for me to think about big ideas and then force the production to execute them. I try to figure out what’s possible and write that down,” he said, discussing a scene in a Broadway theater.

“The budget is different than for ‘The Walking Dead’, but the hope is that we will not be affected by that. We will put the money where it counts.”

Hoffman recalled some famous moments from the show and its brutality, saying, “I don’t like ‘The Walking Dead’ for its brutality. There are shows that make you think and this one makes you feel. We don’t need to make our audience uncomfortable.”

“What an escape,” Morgan laughed, calling – to the audience’s delight – the unforgettable, dazzling scene.

“I remember Steven [Yeun] with all these prosthetics, singing and dancing in his makeup trailer, having the best time. Now it would be a TikTok video.”