<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nA decade later, Morgan says The Walking Dead fans still conflate the actor with the villain \u2014 something that has gone on pretty much since the character\u2019s infamous entrance. Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Morgan discussed the hate he gets out on the street.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still get hate,\u201d he said. \u201cI get people all the time that are just furious with the fact that I killed Glenn. He was so loved. And I never understood how they didn’t know it was going to happen. Like Glenn was, I thought, a gimme. Abraham was a bonus. But Glenn died in the comic books, and that had come out four years prior. And so I was kind of shocked with the amount of people that one, it just sucked the air right out of them, but that just hated Negan and Jeffrey Dean with fervor. With fervor!\u201d<\/p>\n
Morgan went on to describe the most extreme version of this real-world hate he received, when an elderly lady started hitting him with her purse and swearing at him during an encounter in a coffee shop with The Walking Dead co-star Norman Reedus.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Georgia, Norman and I would ride around motorcycles a lot and we’d go to various places, and I remember we had stopped at this coffee place and we got a coffee,\u201d Morgan recalled. \u201cThis old lady \u2014 she was probably 80 \u2014 she was with her granddaughter who was super excited to see Norman and I. But when she saw me, the older lady, she smacked me with her purse and started swearing at me, like dropping f-bombs! And it was like, serious. I remember Norman was like, \u2018We got to go. We got to get the hell out of here. Like this is serious.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I still can walk down the street in New York today\u2026 we could go out right now and someone’s going to yell at me and flip me off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite this, Morgan sounds philosophical about the hate he still receives for Negan, calling it \u201chilarious.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ve gotten so used to it now that it’s just part of the deal,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you go online \u2014 I don’t anymore \u2014 but it’s tremendous the amount of hate that Negan has. It’s a good 50\/50 split, or people love to hate him.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\nMorgan added that there was a time when he\u2019d go to bat for Negan, defending the character in the face of fan hate, but no more.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there’s something very interesting about Negan,\u201d he said. \u201cI think taking someone that does something so terrible in the show, it’s hard to say that he’s necessarily a villain if you break down this apocalyptic world because everybody’s murdered somebody.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut he came on the show and f***ed with our main cast, and those were the audience’s heroes, and killed two of them. So I get it, but at the same time, if you’re such a fan of the show and this world\u2026 but you don’t expect people to think logically and that’s not going to happen. And so I just kind of\u2026 it\u2019s this now [shrugs].<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to really defend Negan. And now I\u2019m just like, hey, whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in the interview, which is well worth a watch if you\u2019re into Morgan\u2019s career, he talks about being ready to walk away from The Walking Dead after Season 2 of Dead City because he felt like the show had played out Negan\u2019s relationship with Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan).<\/p>\n
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Dean Morgan says he still gets angry fans confronting him over the actions of his The Walking Dead villain, Negan, with people swearing at him in the street on a regular basis. Negan is one of the most iconic villains in television history, joining The Walking Dead at the height of its popularity back<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[256,2318,9928,3771,7821,9927,9929,9930,5692],"class_list":{"0":"post-11128","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news","8":"tag-actor","9":"tag-dead","10":"tag-dean","11":"tag-fan","12":"tag-hate","13":"tag-jeffrey","14":"tag-morgan","15":"tag-negan","16":"tag-walking"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}