Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Dead City.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan is The Walking Dead‘s Negan, and his stint in the highly anticipated spinoff, Dead City, is as gory and violent as fans have been expecting.
Negan’s story arc in The Walking Dead saw him experience some intense character growth. a sense of — dare we say — gratitude being born within him, resulting in a bit of a toned-down version of himself. However, fans everywhere knew that the Negan we first met and yelled obscenities at as he killed two fan-favorite characters was still there — just beneath the surface. It’s almost as if Negan had to work hard to be a lesser version of himself, and at times, it’s work he didn’t mind doing.
In Dead City, we’ve seen him doing less of that work and embracing the evil he’s faced with. Almost as if he were the same Negan we met in season six of The Walking Dead — ready to pounce with a blatant disregard for what his actions lead to. In a chat with Entertainment Weekly, Morgan opened up about a particularly nauseating moment in the most recent episode of Dead City.
“The face-grating killed me. I was like, ‘Really? I’m going to get him with a face-grater?’ But this is a guy that’s like 6-foot-6, and 200-some-odd-pounds of muscle. You know, Negan is not that guy. But that survival instinct kicks in with ‘What can I use to, to fight back?’ A cheese grater happened to be at hand, and that gets that guy off of him.”
Of course, it’s essential to talk about what led up to the cheese-grater moment. Leading up to that point, he told the bad guy that he didn’t want it to escalate; he didn’t want to be the Negan everyone is convinced he still is and always will be. He’s been, as Morgan puts it, “trying to be the guy that we have known the last couple of years,” but there comes a time when life or death brings out our most primal instincts. Negan’s just so happen to be a little on the twisted side.
“There’s that whole dance that happens before the cheese grater where I’m trying to step around him. And I warn him a good three, four times — ‘Look, I don’t want it to go here. It doesn’t have to go here. Let’s not take it there.’ And he is like, ‘It’s going there.’ So Negan again is trying to be that guy that we have known the last couple years and do the right thing. But when it comes down to it, and it’s a matter of survival. Negan is Negan, and if it’s means pushing him down on that pipe that’s coming out of the ground and giving a little smile, there he is!”
Morgan also points out the importance of showing this side of Negan again. In fact, it’s not just important — it’s critical to the entire TWD universe as a whole.
“I think people were wondering if it was a good idea or not to let that Negan come out again. And I always have been like, ‘We have to. It’s so important. It’s who this character is, and we can’t take that away from him.'”
That being said, it’s clear that we’ve not yet seen the last of Negan, be it his most fundamental self or the mask he wears to “try to be good,” and we can’t wait to see what that means for the rest of the storytelling arc in Dead City. Plus, all of these versions of Negan showing themselves again alongside Maggie means something extra special; it was the most rooted-in-evil version of the character that took the life of her husband, and it’ll be interesting to see what she does when that side of him comes out again, where their survival is concerned this time around.
Perhaps she’ll find a way to allow it.
