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Jeffrey Dean Morgan On ‘The Walking Dead’ Murder Scenes, ‘I Didn’t Want To Do It Anymore’

By Lindsay McCane
Published on: 05:55 PST, Oct 25, 2016

Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Negan, the leader of the outsider group called the Saviors, on The Walking Dead, and is definitely one of the most hated characters on television at the moment. However, Morgan wants TWD fans to realize there is more to Negan than being a heartless murderer.

In a new interview with Interview Magazine,Morgan talked about his character, and how hard it was to film the premiere episode that left fans angry and heartbroken.

“Not that I’m going to make excuses for Negan, but we seem to forget as an audience, and as fans of the show, that Rick and Daryl and the rest of them killed probably 30, 40 of my men, and so far I’ve only killed two of them. Negan just did it with some panache,” Jeffrey explained.

“He’s a brutal son of a b—, but there are also parts about him that I find kind of endearing. We’ll see if the audience responds to it,” Morgan continued. “I think that the first episode is going to be rough, and people aren’t going to be real fond of me or Negan, and I think as time wears on and you get to know him a little bit more and understand his way of thinking, there could be a shift in that. Maybe they’ll love to hate him as opposed to just hating him.”

The premiere episode of The Walking Dead was gruesome to say the least, and Morgan wants everyone to know that it wasn’t easy to film the scenes of him murdering some of the fan-favorite characters. At one point, he said, it got to the point where he simply didn’t want to do it anymore.

“I think maybe it was the Carl’s arm bit to be honest with you,” Morgan said. “Look, that whole episode was hard, and also because I did go through and smack everybody with Lucille at a certain point. Everybody took a hit. All of that was hard.”

“It got to the point where I didn’t want to do it anymore. … Emotionally I was completely drained—all of us were, I would imagine,” Morgan continued. “Andy and I just went through the ringer. It was a hard episode, and having to get there time and time again to do these horrible things… They’re all good people, and I love them—the whole cast—so to keep riding them as hard as I was riding them, in-between takes it was like, god, you’ve got to catch your breath a little bit.”

Jeffrey added: “It was just so f—ing heavy at all times. In the show that aired, there’s no let up, and it was like that for 10 days for us. It wasn’t just 40 minutes of it; it was 10 days of that, every day, all day.”

According to Vulture, in a previous interview, Jeffrey Dean Morgan talked about how hard it was for the cast to accept him when he was first cast in the series. However, Morgan says he is now a part of the group and is able to cut up and be himself around them all.

“So it was a hard time initially, at first especially, and this year we’ve had some speed bumps as far as that kind of stuff,” Morgan said. “But I’ll tell you, as soon as we say cut, there’s lots of hugs going around for everybody and we’ve managed to get through it. But it was a little a weird going in initially when I didn’t know anybody really. I was careful not to be a dick, I guess. Like, Don’t say anything inappropriate, Jeff. Now I can be inappropriate and tell jokes and it’s fine, but I was careful going in, because it was a fragile time for everybody, and I was very aware of it.”

[Featured Image by Joe Scarnici/ Getty Images]

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