The Ones Who Live Stars on That Cameo, Violent Death

[This story contains major spoilers for The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live episode five.]

The Walking Dead giveth, The Walking Dead taketh. In its penultimate hour, the Rick and Michonne-centric The Ones Who Live reintroduced one of the mothership series’ most enduring figures: Father Gabriel, the once-cowardly preacher turned warrior-leader of Alexandria, played by Seth Gilliam.

In the same breath, the spinoff also removed one of the franchise’s other most enduring figures from the board: Jadis, aka Anne, aka Jadis Stokes of the CRM, played by Pollyanna McIntosh. Having appeared in three different iterations of The Walking Dead in a variety of antagonistic roles, McIntosh’s erstwhile leader of the Garbage People is now in the heap herself — though, not without putting up as much resistance as humanly possible.

“She died by a bed on the head, an ax wound, a car crash, a walker and Rick’s gun,” McIntosh tells The Hollywood Reporter as she counts out the myriad ways Jadis suffers in her final episode. “Yeah. Boy. She sure dies for a long time!”

Jadis’ end comes at the conclusion of an episode in which she takes center stage, with some flashbacks for good measure. The story is framed by scenes in which Jadis returns to the outskirts of Alexandria where she meets up with Father Gabriel, her onetime lover, now turned confidant. Jadis and Gabriel embark on a series of annual meetings, during which the preacher takes the military woman’s confessions and provides a place where she can truly be herself.

“It’s like the comedy, Same Time Next Year,” Gilliam tells THR about his return, which resolves the letter but intense relationship between Gabriel and Jadis from the early going of The Walking Dead season nine. “He was very much left in the lurch and, even if it was brief, it was extremely intense and fast moving. There was some unfinished business.”

As the original Walking Dead finished airing only a year earlier, Gilliam says Gabriel was still close enough for him to access, and remains that way in case he’s called back into action again. According to the actor, music is an important part of how he gets into character, and his scenes with Jadis were no different, the two of them relying on “Torn,” made famous by Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 version of the song.

“Seth always works with music,” says McIntosh, “and I think in this song, it’s relevant.” For her part, the actress had her own playlist, which includes “Down by the River” by Milky Chance and “Little Girl Gone” by Chinchilla. “She’s just always holding onto so much, especially in those scenes with Gabriel. Even the knowledge that Rick is not dead is this huge thing she’s holding onto.”

In the modern-day storyline, Jadis is going out of her way to make sure Rick is actually dead. She hunts down Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) and decides to put the two of them down once and for all, resulting in the myriad bloody steps toward her eventual death. According to McIntosh, Jadis’ death was a surprise, if not a huge one.

“I found out I’d be popping my clogs about a week into being in New Jersey,” she says. “But I knew about five months before I left the flagship show, about four-and-a-half years ago now, that we were going to make this. In the meantime, [showrunner] Scott Gimple texted me one day and asked if I’d want to be in The World Beyond. I thought that was fun, let’s do more with Jadis! But it ended up being very lucky that I had the time to be on that show, because it helped inform this world in new ways.”

But when she found out about Jadis’ fate, McIntosh had one question: ‘What do I have to do not to die?’” Not seriously, of course, as the actress makes it clear: “This is part of the deal with Walking Dead. And, what fun to get to do it on that show? Because they’re just so good at making you question a character and really go deep with the nuance of the grays among the black and white of humanity. They didn’t disappoint with how they brought me down.”

The six-episode season of The Ones Who Live releases weekly on Sundays starting Feb. 25 on AMC and AMC+, with the finale releasing next week.