Warning: Contains major spoilers for The Walking Dead: Dead City.
Mahina Napoleon is living a double life. The rising Filipino-Hawaiian star has spent the past few years embodying the tense, silent, and traumatized Ginny in The Walking Dead: Dead City, AMC’s spin-off series of its award-winning post-apocalyptic zombie (referred to as “walkers” in the series) saga. Off-screen, Napoleon was navigating the ups and downs of high school, caught between being perceived by her peers while trying to find her footing as an actress. “I mean, everybody knew,” she told me on our call to talk about her time in the show. “But it was kind of just everybody trying to treat me normal, which I loved. Because I am normal. I’m a normal kid.”
Napoleon couldn’t be more different than her walker-killing alter ego. Where Ginny spends most of her time in the show voluntarily mute, a physical response to witnessing her father be murdered and turned into a walker, Napoleon is bright-eyed, smiling and eager to chat about her experience working with fellow cast members Jeffrey Dean Morgan (who plays the complicated anti-hero Negan Smith) and Lauren Cohan (the battle-hardened Maggie Rhee). “I’m definitely a yapper,” Napoleon joked. “I can be silent sometimes, though… no, that’s a lie.”
The show follows Maggie, Negan, and anyone in their motley crew as they travel a crumbling, anarchic, and walker-infested Manhattan. Although the series has seen its fair share of mixed reviews, fans have praised its latest season for veering into the realm of absurdity, amped-up violence, and an even heavier presence of generational trauma than its first season. At the time of writing, The Walking Dead: Dead City has concluded its second season and is officially being renewed for a third, with The Walking Dead veteran writer Seth Hoffman taking the lead as its new showrunner.
Napoleon is no stranger to joining the large ensemble cast of a widely successful series. Her breakout role as the lively Julie Tennant on NCIS: Hawai’i cemented her place as a young talent capable of holding her own alongside seasoned actors. However, bagging her role as Ginny felt even more personal, given her love for the original series.
“I used to watch The Walking Dead all the time when I probably wasn’t supposed to,” said Napoleon. “I was like five or six. But I used to watch it all the time with my father, and we loved it. So getting this audition and getting the role, it was super surreal.”
“It was really funny, too, because my characters on both shows are total polar opposites,” she added. “The one on NCIS: Hawai’i, she’s very preppy. And then the other one is a zombie killer.”
The actress admitted that she had to navigate a steeper learning curve coming into The Walking Dead: Dead City, especially because of the trauma that her character had experienced. “Hearing Ginny’s storyline — from her losing her dad, to finding Negan and having a father figure in him, to then also losing him — it felt like she was going through so much. My job was to figure out what I [could] do to make that feeling of heaviness as real as possible for the audience so that they can feel it with her.”
“But going into Season 1 being totally mute, I had to learn to work with what was happening in the moment and lean more on my facial expressions,” continued Napoleon. “I had to feed off of whatever Lauren or Jeffrey was doing. Lauren especially helped talk me through these scenes and get those bigger emotions to the surface.”
Although Napoleon grew close to her fellow cast members throughout shooting the series, things were cut short when Napoleon’s character was killed off as one of the big surprises for the second season. “I remember getting the script for Season 2 and reading it, but being in so much denial,” Napoleon recalled. “But I thought about it more, and it’s good character development, because she’s this kid who’s gotten so close with everyone: it’s just more heartfelt, and the stakes feel so much higher.”
“Filming that scene, I had my contacts in, but I was trying hard to not cry,” she continued. “I was trying to make the walker noises, but it felt so heavy-hearted…but it was a good feeling, too, though. It’s the start of a new life for Negan, for Maggie, and even Ginny. I’ve been seeing these edits on TikTok where fans are pointing out how much Ginny has grown, and even with this death, she’s going on a path that is probably better for her because of what happened to her father and how that took a toll on her. I think she’s better off… I don’t want to say that she’s better off dead, but I think she is. I think she’s free now.”
When asked if there’s any chance that her character might make an appearance in the show’s third season, Napoleon just laughed. “I don’t want to give out any spoilers,” she said. “I have no idea if I’m being brought back or not. All I’ll say is that yes, it was a very bittersweet ending to the season, but I’m grateful for this entire journey.”
