With 17 million mesmerized Americans watching Sunday’s season 7 debut, The Walking Dead continue to post scary numbers – close to its all time high rating and worthy of the biggest show on television. Credit the mammoth cliffhanger with which the show’s writers tormented fans in the months since the end of Season 6: who would Neegan dispatch? The latest addition to the show’s cast of characters, played by Jeffery Dean Morgan, is, as Andrew Lincoln told us, a “charismatic, brilliant, brutal psychotic” and that may be why it’s so hard to avert your eyes from his consummate cruelty. The HFPA’s Gabriel Lerman spoke to Lincoln and Morgan about the show after Neegan, and what it takes to play the foulest of villains.