Aimee Garcia on The Walking Dead: Dead Citys Renata Shocker

The Walking Dead: Dead City‘s third season is winding down — but not without some major body drops first! Warning: The following post contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 Episode 7, “Hourglass.”

In the seventh episode, viewers said goodbye to Aimee Garcia‘s Renata, who has been a force to reckon with ever since her introduction in the premiere episode.

Though the fierce leader was hunting down Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) before her untimely end, Renata was also helping Maggie (Lauren Cohan) build an ambitious, new community in Manhattan. In her final moments, Renata tried to persuade Negan to leave the bar with logic — even telling him that she doesn’t want to kill him, she just wants him to “grow up.” Unhinged bar owner Dillard (Jimmi Simpson), Negan’s former friend, didn’t like that, though. He wasn’t on board with the idea of Negan not paying for his crimes (which, in his mind, involve Dillard’s undead friends getting murdered) or Renata’s idealistic views of society forming after years of post-apocalyptic chaos. So, Dillard stepped up to defy Renata, saying, “You’re positively not in charge, because if you were, you could’ve stopped this.” And then he shot her in the chest.

She will certainly be missed by those around her. But first, we caught up with the Lucifer and Dexter vet to see how she feels about Renata’s fate at the hands of Dillard (Jimmi Simpson), her final scenes, and more.

Renata had such a big role this season. When you look back at your Walking Dead experience, what are some of your favorite memories from shooting that jump out at you?

Aimee Garcia: Oh, dancing in the freezing cold with Lauren. Watching how gracious Jeffrey is with fans. He just lights them up, all ages. Working with the incredible Raúl [Castillo, who plays Renata’s brother Luis] and Jimmi and Logan [Kim, as Herschel] — everyone just felt like family. Our family dinners, Lauren, despite being so busy, I don’t know how she found the time, would organize dinners on the weekends, and we would all just laugh, have fun, and decompress. It was a wonderful experience.

Robert Clark / AMC

Let’s talk about Dillard and Renata’s relationship, which was so interesting this season, especially after their karaoke moment in Episode 5. Dillard was seemingly romantically interested in her. What do you make of their dynamic and why Dillard eventually decided to kill her?

I think Dillard and Renata are opposites in a lot of ways, which makes them very yin and yang. Dillard spent the entire apocalypse by himself, and in order to avoid spiraling, [he] created friends out of walkers. Renata grew up with her family intact, which is very rare in the apocalyptic world. So she grew up with her cousins and her brothers and her uncles and her aunts and her nieces and her nephews and laughter and joy and food and salsa and family love. And so I think that she was afforded the option of hope. And Dillard went on the path of delusion. But, like he says, it was the way that he could survive. Everyone has their coping mechanism. Renata’s was rooted in family and real life. And Dillard’s is rooted in imagination and delusion.

He’s [also] got his whole food chain system with turkeys and frogs and maggots. [He’s got] a stripper pole and karaoke and beer. He’s built this world for himself, and I think Renata tries not to judge. And, like you mentioned, he asks if Renata has asked about him, and Maggie’s like, “No.” [Laughs]

I don’t think that he had any intention of killing her. I think that it really was an unfortunate domino effect where his two best friends in the world happened to be dead. He declawed them, he defanged them. He grew attached to them. It’s like [Cast Away] where Tom Hanks only has the volleyball. For Dillard, these are his versions of friends, and then Negan kills Dillard’s walkers…

Renata also stomps on a walker outside the bar. Do you feel like that helped lead to her death in any way when Dillard saw her disrespecting the undead? And what do you think was going through her mind in that moment?

Her rage moment — I think it was just everything piling up. She never got a chance to process the Croat [Željko Ivanek]
killing her uncle in cold blood in front of her. She never got a chance to process the Croat killing her little baby brother in front of her. I think she feels guilty. She feels like she could have done more. And I think that everyone else got to cry and mourn and let it out. And she didn’t have a second to do that. She needed to go straight to saving this baby, making sure there was a methane tank, figuring out a way to rebuild the hospital. There was just no time for her to process any traumatic experience that she had.

And I think that was a moment where she finally got to be cathartic, and it was a release that she needed to walk off the ledge. And right after that moment, she finally realizes, “I could have killed Negan,” who at this point is an innocent man because we didn’t get all the information on was [going on with] Fabian [Michael Emery], right? What really happened? And so I think she caught herself. What I love about Renata is that she took accountability for what could have been bad news for Negan. And I love her speech at the end where she’s like, “Look, you don’t need to agree with us…” And she does bring up a good point: If you’re building a civilization, who gets to live and who gets to die, and who gets to decide that?

What do you think she would have done next, had they all walked away from this conflict?

I think Renata probably would have handed the reins over to Maggie and said, “You know what? I’m still dealing with this trauma of my family getting killed in cold blood in front of me. I’m not in the right headspace right now. I’ll be the No. 2 to your No. 1.”

I don’t think that she led with ego and pride, or any of that stuff. She carried her father’s pendant around her neck, which reminded her to choose the light in these dark times. And she was doing that. She was clouded because Negan killed Fabian, who was unarmed, in front of her. And that sparked the [memory of] the Croat killing her uncle and her brother, who were unarmed, in front of her.

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