“The Walking Dead” Season 8 has promoted three actors to series regular status, Variety has confirmed.

Steven Ogg, Katelyn Nacon, and Pollyanna McIntosh will all have expanded roles when the AMC zombie apocalypse series returns this fall. Ogg plays Simon, the right-hand man to Savior leader Negan. Nacon is Enid, a teenage resident of Alexandria who has shown a connection to Carl. McIntosh plays one of the newest characters on the show, Jadis, leader of the junk yard scavengers.

Season 7 of the series saw the departure of several main cast members, including Steven Yeun and Michael Cudlitz, whose characters, Glenn and Abraham, were killed in the season opener. Sonequa Martin-Green, who played Sasha, died in the season finale. She will next star in the CBS All Access series “Star Trek: Discovery.”

Season 8 will pick up amidst the war between Rick’s alliance and The Saviors. Series showrunner Scott Gimple previously said that the season will see Rick and company battling to preserve the very fragile civilization they have established.

“It’s essentially for the whole world as far as their experience,” Gimple told Variety when the season concluded. “It isn’t just their little corner. It’s the Kingdom and the Hilltop too. The Governor just wanted them dead. Negan would be happy if everyone was alive and well and working for him. There’s a very basic political idea at play here. They want to live in a fair world instead of having it just be Negan’s. To that end, that idea feels to me like the beginning of civilization is at stake, this new civilization they want to build rather than live this strange half-life serving a despot.”

source: http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/the-...rs-1202032195/