In an exclusive interview with Screen Rant, Gilliam reflected on his surprise return as Father Gabriel and reunion with Jadis in The Ones Who Live episode 5. The actor expressed his excitement about working with McIntosh again and discussed the intense relationship between their characters. Read his full comments below:

I was excited by it. I was excited by it, because I loved working with Pollyanna McIntosh on The Walking Dead, and I thought the time I got to work with her was too brief. It was an intense relationship that the characters had, but it was brief timewise for us as actors to play it, so I was excited to get back to it and feel like we had our own episode within an episode. Not only is it “And Seth Gilliam as Father Gabriel,” it’s “Seth Gilliam is Father Gabriel in The Ones Who Live, as…” You know what I mean? Little extra things.

I got the feeling that between those two characters, though time passes, there is no lapse in time. It’s kind of like when you know somebody or you are so drawn to somebody that you watch them and study them, and you see yourself being watched and studied in return. Whenever you run into them, there’s almost an “I see you, you see me, we see each other,” kind of relationship. Though they were going through very extreme things during that time, they get back together again, and time was never a factor.Jadis & Father Gabriel’s The Ones Who Live Episode 5 Reunion Explained

Though the spinoff largely focuses on Rick and Michonne’s love story, Jadis and Father Gabriel’s reunion is entirely unrelated to the main characters. The Ones Who Live episode 5’s flashbacks reveal that Jadis and Father Gabriel had been meeting secretly in the woods once a year for the past three years, going back to the events of The Walking Dead season 9. Their second meeting occurred during the Whisperer War, and their third and final meeting took place sometime during The Walking Dead ending, representing the last time Gabriel sees Jadis.

After killing Huck in World Beyond, Jadis transformed into a full-fledged villain, but her flashbacks with Father Gabriel serve to humanize her before her death in The Ones Who Live episode 5. In addition to showing Gabriel’s lasting feelings for her, episode 5’s intermittent flashbacks portray Jadis in a more relatable light, illustrating her internal conflicts as a high-ranking officer in the CRM. She regrets the person she’s become and, after being bit, this realization leads Jadis to help Rick and Michonne by telling them where the CRM documents on Alexandria’s location are.