On screen, Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s characters, Maggie and Negan, have been at each other’s throats for years. That’s because, in Season 7 of The Walking Dead, the latter slaughtered the former’s husband with a barbed wire-covered baseball bat while she sat by helplessly. To put it lightly, Maggie’s hatred towards Negan is totally understandable. In the first season of the pair’s spin-off series, The Walking Dead: Dead City, they were forced to work together and got to know each other on a deeper level, resulting in the blossoming of a friendship.

In real life, Cohan and Morgan went into the offshoot supporting one another and fully having each other’s backs. During a recent installment of Collider’s Ladies Night, Perri Nemiroff chatted with Cohan about her time as not only the star of the AMC series, but also how she jumped at the opportunity to add “executive producer” to her list of titles. From the gate, Cohan said she told the powers that be that not only would she and Morgan both be added as EPs, but that they would also be compensated the same, telling Nemiroff:

“When we came to do the show, I was like, ‘Okay, cool, you want to do a spin-off, but I’m going to executive produce the spin-off. I’m going to be involved in that way.’ And then I said, ‘I’m going to do it, and Jeffrey [Dean Morgan] is going to do it, and you’re going to pay us both this much money. It’s going to be the same.’ I wanted to go in with him as my teammate and my partner, and I wanted to be like, ‘We are people that know these roles and we’re empowered and we’re on the level with you guys.’”

Taking the reins and controlling certain aspects of the story came as a welcome change to Cohan, as she recalled, “It was a really, really, really good feeling. We got to just discuss different directions the show could be in and could go in. It was the beginning of something that has, over these three years that we’ve been doing these two seasons, gradually opened up. It’s so never done. It’s so just like a little crack and then, ‘Oh! There’s another library. Let me go read those books.’ And then it never stops.”

Lauren Cohan’s Path To Executive Producer

During her original run on the flagship series, Cohan bowed out and stepped away from the role of Maggie following payment discrepancies before returning for the final season. During this time, she appeared in ABC’s Whiskey Cavalier, with her experiences outside The Walking Dead informing her decision to push forward with production credits when she returned to the franchise.

“In my time between Walking Dead, and then when I was coming back, I had experiences where I had opportunities to do shows and not be an EP, but to have the responsibility and the workload. It’s interesting because when I look back on it now, at that moment, I was like, ‘I don’t know what it means to be a producer. I don’t know the workload. I don’t know the responsibility.’ On The Walking Dead, there’s a huge cast, and there’s a freedom in it, too. Now that I am producing, I look at it and I’m like, ‘You don’t have to think about it. It’s not your job.’ [Laughs] So, I had thought to myself, ‘If I go do something else, I’m going to go in as a producer.’”

For much of her time in the business, Cohan worked in front of the camera, appearing in other fan favorites, like Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries. But her interest in other avenues of the industry led her to fully pursue whatever was thrown her way, explaining:

“To me, a lot of people, I think, want the credit, and I wanted the education. I have such a freakin love for how many ways you can move and learn in this industry — music, cinematography, lighting, camerawork. Everybody’s there because they love the thing, and then they do a different thing in the thing because they love the thing. I feel like it’s one of the most awesome things ever.”

Check out Cohan doing what she loves in The Walking Dead: Dead City’s second season, with new episodes arriving every Sunday on AMC. Cohan’s full episode of Ladies Night will arrive following The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2’s sixth episode, on Monday, June 9. Stay tuned at Collider for more!