Best recognized by fans as the zombie-killing farmer’s daughter Maggie Greene from “The Walking Dead,” Lauren Cohan will take a stab at her first leading role in the horror film “The Boy.”

Cohan’s character Greene on “The Walking Dead” has been a pioneer in the world of horror and drama television.

With an immense fan base through her powerful and emotional performance on “The Walking Dead,” Cohan brings the twisted nightmare to life in “The Boy.”

Cohan plays Greta, a young American who is running away from something in her past, and takes a job as a nanny in a rural English village. She discovers that the family’s 8-year-old is actually a life-sized doll that the elderly parents take care of as if he was a real boy as a form of coping from their actual son’s death 20 years prior. The parents leave her with a list of strict rules to follow. When those rules are broken, a series of mysteriously disturbing events start happening to the unsuspecting nanny.

The DePaulia recently spoke to Cohan via Skype about the film.

The DePaulia: For the film you’re hosting an advanced screening in 15 different cities across the country with a live stream answering questions from fans. You have such a huge fan base going into ‘The Boy” with your past roles. How does it feel knowing you have passionate fans that you’ll have for years to come?

Cohan: I’m so excited how our studio STX connected this film to our audience. They really made this into a fan movie. I think that’s the fun of horror, which is to make it feel like it’s your own thing coming together.

I hope that horror fans and fans from “The Walking Dead” will enjoy this movie and say afterwards that it’s a psychically disturbing journey that she goes on.  It’s an old-fashioned horror movie, which is what really attracted me to doing it. I think fans will see similarities and I think they’ll find this as a good old-fashioned horror film. I’m all excited for the twist and the turns.

DePaulia: In doing the film, actually being afraid when reading it, what was the deal breaker in agreeing to accept the role?

Cohan: I was reading the script on my iPhone, just checking and reading the script’s first couple of pages to see if I was going to read it on my computer later, and before I realized I had read the entire thing on my iPhone while sitting on the plane saying, “Okay, this is a really good sign!”

I also felt excited through a character perspective because she goes through such a roller coaster and is so changed by the end of the film. I felt it was really good from a story perspective because I didn’t see the ending coming. I didn’t see anything coming. I think it’s just a very rare, unique, beautiful, elegant story that has some gut-wrenching twist, so I loved the completion of everything.

DePaulia: Growing up as a kid, creepy porcelain dolls were terrifying to me. What scared you as a kid?

Cohan: “Pet Sematary” was one of my favorite films when I was a kid. The idea that animals were coming back from the dead was a big fear of mine. I feared it because it was something that scared me and it was something I also enjoyed being scared by, but I’m so scared to watch horror movies now (laughs). I also read a lot of fantasy novels about mystical creatures that were larger than life, that can just sort of come take you out on an adventure or take you and kill you.