When charming Jeffrey Dean Morgan walked in to the HFPA Comic-Con lounge he acknowledged that meeting with us has become a yearly routine. Last year he visited our lounge and talked about Extant and The Good Wife, the TV shows he was working on back then – his character Jason Crouse’s romance with Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) on the last season of the CBS hit show had created a lot of buzz. He was still filming the popular legal drama when he got a phone call from his team: “They told me The Walking Dead have offered me this role and it’s to be the villain on the show.”

Jeffrey Dean had been following AMC’s hit zombie show from the beginning. He has also read some of the Walking Dead comic books by Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore that are the foundation for the show. The comix gave him a hint of who the character might be. “I was like… is it Negan?  And they were like, well they won’t tell us who it is, because everything is top secret. And I was like, it’s going to be Negan. And it was an immediate yeah, let’s do it.”

He told us that his work in Atlanta, where the show is filmed, is very intense. “Negan talks so much and there is no breather for me. The show has never been big on dialogue and I think right now the writers are maybe having too much fun because they haven’t had to write a whole bunch of dialogue before and now it’s just monologues. And then you add the zombie aspect and the fighting and the action and the Atlanta heat. It’s physically and mentally more demanding than anything I have done.”