wmagazine – Katherine McNamara wants to make one thing abundantly clear: Walker Independence is “not your mama’s Western.” Having grown up in Kansas City, the actress admits the familiarity of the old-fashioned genre has always held a special place in her heart. But when she first read the pilot of Walker Independence, the late 19th-century prequel to Jared Padalecki’s Walker, McNamara—who rose to fame as Clary Fray in Freeform’s Shadowhunters and as Mia Smoak in The CW’s Arrow—could tell something was different. Created by Seamus Kevin Fahey and Anna Fricke, the latest CW drama follows Abby Walker (McNamara), an affluent, strong-willed Bostonian schoolteacher who witnesses the cold-blooded murder of her husband during their journey to Texas, where he was set to become the new sheriff of a small town called Independence.

After crossing paths with an Apache tracker named Calian (Justin Johnson Cortez), Abby completes her trip to Independence, where she encounters a number of diverse and eclectic residents, including Tom Davidson (Greg Hovanessian), the new sheriff who fits the description of the man who killed her husband. “She’s a bit out of [her] time,” McNamara tells W over Zoom. “She’s educated; she’s independent. We don’t often see women in this period with this much agency.”

Ahead of Thursday’s series premiere, McNamara speaks about Abby’s forthcoming quest for justice in Independence, her biggest personal takeaways from working on Shadowhunters, and the healthy balance she tries to strike on social media.

What sets Abby apart from other characters you’ve played in the past?
I’ve been doing a lot of action-based stories lately, and playing a lot of characters that tend to exist in jeans, combat boots and leather jackets. Then suddenly, I’m in a dress, boots, and a corset, and I have to be a lady of Boston society from the 1800s. I’ve been craving something new and different for a really long time, and this was a perfect opportunity to still find that sort of strong female character, but within a different genre.

This show is subversive in that it honors the classic cornerstones of Westerns, while telling the story from the perspective of a young woman.
What I’ve been striving for, with Abby, is to find a way to still carry forward that fire we see in her, [while] not knowing which choice she’s going to make next. There’s this great element to Westerns where justice is an enigma. And because the world is still being formed, so [are the notions of] right and wrong, and the law is not always “justice.” There are different ways of getting justice in the West that puts characters in a bit of a gray area and allows them to take actions that you might not expect and that might not always be morally sound.