EXCLUSIVE: The Walking Dead’s Gale Anne Hurd: No One Would Be More Excited To See Negan Than Me

Last night at the red carpet premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead Season Six at Madison Square Garden, ComicBook.com had an opportunity to ask executive producer Gale Anne Hurd about the recent rumors that a casting call put out by producers was in fact for Negan, the longest-running villain in Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s comic book series on which the show is based.

After chuckling at our question, Hurd said, “There is no one who would be more excited to see Negan on the show than me. I think the arc right now in the comic book with his character is so interesting. He’s gone through so many different evolutions where he was a threat and then he wasn’t a threat and now he’s a threat again. I love the idea of having a villain who is not going to be done in a one-season arc.”

That’s something we saw a bit on the TV series, of course, in the early going: people you didn’t kill would return to be a bigger threat later. noted this to Hurd.

“That’s what certainly happened in the comic book,” she said. “When you let that kind of evil fester, sometimes it can infect the innocent people as we’ve seen in the comic book.”

The Walking Dead returns Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.