Jeffrey Dean Morgan says he still gets angry fans confronting him over the actions of his The Walking Dead villain, Negan, with people swearing at him in the street on a regular basis.
Negan is one of the most iconic villains in television history, joining The Walking Dead at the height of its popularity back in 2016. In his chilling debut in the Season 6 finale, Negan confronts the captured Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and the other heroes of the show. Wielding his barbed-wire baseball bat, Lucille, Negan brutally kills Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz) and Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun) at the start of Season 7, cementing his role as the series’ primary antagonist.
But Negan has become an anti-hero of sorts as one of two protagonists in spinoff The Walking Dead: Dead City, which is in the middle of Season 3.
Every Death on The Walking Dead
A decade later, Morgan says The Walking Dead fans still conflate the actor with the villain — something that has gone on pretty much since the character’s infamous entrance. Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Morgan discussed the hate he gets out on the street.
“I still get hate,” he said. “I get people all the time that are just furious with the fact that I killed Glenn. He was so loved. And I never understood how they didn’t know it was going to happen. Like Glenn was, I thought, a gimme. Abraham was a bonus. But Glenn died in the comic books, and that had come out four years prior. And so I was kind of shocked with the amount of people that one, it just sucked the air right out of them, but that just hated Negan and Jeffrey Dean with fervor. With fervor!”
Morgan went on to describe the most extreme version of this real-world hate he received, when an elderly lady started hitting him with her purse and swearing at him during an encounter in a coffee shop with The Walking Dead co-star Norman Reedus.
“In Georgia, Norman and I would ride around motorcycles a lot and we’d go to various places, and I remember we had stopped at this coffee place and we got a coffee,” Morgan recalled. “This old lady — she was probably 80 — she was with her granddaughter who was super excited to see Norman and I. But when she saw me, the older lady, she smacked me with her purse and started swearing at me, like dropping f-bombs! And it was like, serious. I remember Norman was like, ‘We got to go. We got to get the hell out of here. Like this is serious.’
“But I still can walk down the street in New York today… we could go out right now and someone’s going to yell at me and flip me off.”
Despite this, Morgan sounds philosophical about the hate he still receives for Negan, calling it “hilarious.”
“I’ve gotten so used to it now that it’s just part of the deal,” he said. “If you go online — I don’t anymore — but it’s tremendous the amount of hate that Negan has. It’s a good 50/50 split, or people love to hate him.”
Morgan added that there was a time when he’d go to bat for Negan, defending the character in the face of fan hate, but no more.
“I think there’s something very interesting about Negan,” he said. “I think taking someone that does something so terrible in the show, it’s hard to say that he’s necessarily a villain if you break down this apocalyptic world because everybody’s murdered somebody.
“But he came on the show and f***ed with our main cast, and those were the audience’s heroes, and killed two of them. So I get it, but at the same time, if you’re such a fan of the show and this world… but you don’t expect people to think logically and that’s not going to happen. And so I just kind of… it’s this now [shrugs].
“I used to really defend Negan. And now I’m just like, hey, whatever.”
Elsewhere in the interview, which is well worth a watch if you’re into Morgan’s career, he talks about being ready to walk away from The Walking Dead after Season 2 of Dead City because he felt like the show had played out Negan’s relationship with Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan).
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.