If you’ve been waiting on little tenterhooks all season long to see Negan, the bat-wielding maniac murderer of The Walking Dead, get his comeuppance for killing Glenn and Abraham, you’ll want to gird your loins for some very bad news: You’re gonna be waiting a long, long time.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays this season’s terrifying-yet-charming villain, revealed in a Howard Stern Show interview Tuesday, November 29, that his character will survive until at least season 8. Furthermore, the actor’s not at all sorry about it.
“I know I will be on board for season 8,” Morgan confirmed, adding that filming had only just wrapped on the last episodes of the AMC series’ currently airing seventh season. And if you love the way Morgan looks in that slimming, blood-splattered leather jacket, you’ll definitely want to tune in for the last two episodes before the midseason break in December.
“The next two, I’m really big in,” the Good Wife alum, 50, said. “I’m f–king heavy in those.”
For any viewers who think it’s unfair that Negan will survive for so long after crushing the skulls of two very beloved characters in the season 7 premiere, Morgan would like to point out that you’re really being kind of a hypocrite.
“They killed 30 of my men while they slept,” he said of Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and the Alexandrians. “So far, I’ve tapped a couple of guys in the head with a baseball bat, and all of a sudden it’s the end of the world!”
Obviously, Morgan has yet to internalize the cardinal rule of Walking Dead fandom: Whatever it is, it’s OK when Rick Grimes does it. (Duh!) But considering that he’ll be sticking around Zombieland for another year at least, we think he’ll learn eventually — as in, just in time for someone to crush his head like an overripe cantaloupe with his own favorite instrument of death.
The Walking Dead airs on AMC Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
