Learn all about Princess, the quirky new character on The Walking Dead

On Sunday night’s new episode of The Walking Dead, “Look at the Flowers,” a brand-new character was introduced: Princess, aka Juanita Sanchez. Princess — or as she likes to refer to herself, the Princess of Pittsburgh — was introduced late in Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead comics, and is still alive and well by the end of that series.

She’s fun-loving, overly-talkative, and generally considered one of the good guys. She dresses the way she does because she’s been running around the city of Pittsburgh all by herself with little to no human contact. That’s also why she decorated those walkers and placed them in funny positions; you’ve gotta keep yourself occupied.

Entertainment Weekly asked The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang, about the introduction of this vibrant new character. “Yeah, for comic book readers, they know that this is Princess,” Kang said. “She’s a really fun character, and here’s this person who has been stuck in this city and she has forged her own path in life to try to deal with everything that’s happened.”

"And I’ll say that she is in obviously some sort of strange confrontation with our people, and we’ll learn a lot more about her in the episode to follow. And she becomes an important catalyst for some of the things that are to happen. But we love this actress we cast, Paolo Lazaro. She’s wonderful. Just folded right in with the cast, is incredibly funny, but has a great dark sense of humor. And so I’m excited for people to see what she brings to this mix going forward."

You might recognize Lazaro from her stint on Fox’s Lethal Weapon series, or Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga.

It makes sense to introduce Princess at this point in the show, since the Whisperer War is coming to a close. The next logical storyline is the group interacting with the Commonwealth, a civilization advanced beyond anything we’ve seen on the show so far. Princess is part of that journey.

Kang also briefly talked about the reveal that Beta (Ryan Hurst) was a well-known country music singer before the zombie apocalypse, something fans figured out a while back. In “Look at the Flowers,” he finally embraces that fact and becomes the new Alpha of the Whisperers. But don’t go calling him Half Moon, because that’s not his name.

"Half Moon was just the name of the album, and I can’t remember who came up with it. I think it was a little bit influenced by the image of him sort of in shadows. And I was looking back at old album covers of Garth Brooks and there’s some really great stuff where he was really in shadow. I think he was the artist who had the alter ego for a second."

“And there’s a song that played earlier in the season that Magna was listening to, and Emily Kinney actually wrote the song, our alum who played Beth,” Kang continued. “And that was Ryan Hurst singing that song, and that’s the song that recurs now, so we had a little bit of fun kind of burying all of that kind of in the show and even in [spinoff show Fear the Walking Dead].”

The Walking Dead season 10 will air its finale — well, sort of — this Sunday, only on AMC.

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