Fear the Walking Dead showrunners preview 'impactful' return of Kim Dickens as Madison

She survived the zombie outbreak. And she apparently also survived a baseball stadium engulfed in flames and filled with the infected. Three seasons after she was "killed off" on Fear the Walking Dead, Kim Dickens' Madison Clark will be making her triumphant return in the back half of season 7, premiering April 17 on AMC.

We got our first glimpse of Madison's return in a recently released trailer, which shows Madison shuffling into what appears to be an interrogation room, reaching for an oxygen mask, and covering her "Alicia" and "Nick" tattoos.

"What's your name?" a voice asks over a speaker. "Madison," she responds. "Not anymore," the voice replies. "We will tell you who you are going to be from now on."

So exactly how much Madison are we going to see in season 7 (before Dickens returns as a full cast member in season 8)? Will we be told what happened to the character in the gap between the baseball stadium and now, or will we actually get to see it in flashbacks? We interrogated showrunners Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss to get some answers.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: We saw the trailer scene that you put out with the return of Madison. So what can you say about that in terms of where she is and who is there with her?

IAN GOLDBERG: Well, she looked like she had some new tattoos to me. And look, without giving too much away, she's in a very different place than when we left her in the middle of season 4 at the stadium. And Madison has been on quite a journey since then, as have all of our characters. And we're just really excited.

Kim, I know, has spoken in interviews about this being Madison 2.0, and it really is. It is an evolution and a redefinition of Madison Clark, and it's going to be fantastic. And we're excited to reintroduce her to both fans and into the world of Fear as she kind of interacts with characters we haven't seen her interact with before.

How much is she in season 7? Is this like when Lauren Cohan came back to The Walking Dead, and she was in one episode in what was supposed to be the end of season 10, and then came back fully after that? How much is Kim in this season?

ANDREW CHAMBLISS: She is going to be returning in a way that will impact the end of season 7 and have huge ripples going into season 8. But that's not to say when we see her this season that it will be in a small role. It'll be in a very big, impactful way.

Whether this is in season 7 or season 8, is your plan to tell what happened in this gap of time in which we have not seen her, or to show it in flashbacks? How are you approaching the big gap that we're going to have here?

GOLDBERG: We're not taking anything off the table between flashbacks and talking about it in the present. There's obviously a lot of story to tell there, and we have a lot of ideas for how we're going to tell it. So maybe a little from column A, a little from column B.

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