The Walking Dead’s Michael Cudlitz Challenges Jeffrey Dean Morgan To Round 2

The Walking Dead star-turned-director Michael Cudlitz issued a playful challenge for Negan star Jeffrey Dean Morgan when posing with a stories-tall Louisville Slugger, the same brand of baseball bat used by Negan to kill Cudlitz’s Abraham Ford in the Season 7 opener. There Negan played a game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe before selecting the posturing Abe as his first victim, who was then brutally bludgeoned to death with barbwire-wrapped bat Lucille before Glenn (Steven Yeun) met the same fate.

“Ok @jeffreydeanmorgan let’s try this sh-t again….. #round2,” Cudlitz wrote on Instagram Friday. In a comment, the official Instagram account for AMC’s TWD joked it was still “too soon,” and Cudlitz’s former co-star Christian Serratos, who played Abraham’s lover Rosita, commented with a simple “Lol.”

Cudlitz previously said the series made the wrong move when killing Abraham and Glenn back-to-back in an episode that was quickly criticized for its harsher-than-usual violence.

“I always said, I personally thought it was not the wisest thing to take both Abraham and Glenn out in the same episode. It’s too much of a loss for the fans, for the audience,” Cudlitz told IMDb in April. “[Glenn’s] like the moral compass and the heart of the show at the time, even pulling Rick back, he was almost the Hershel whisperer — he’d also become that other side of him that was able to guide him, or at least help guide him.”

Cudlitz, who returned to TWD as director on Season 9 episode ‘Stradivarius,’ also said the show missed an “element of humor,” something the show started “getting back to” in Season 9 under showrunner Angela Kang.

“And Abraham, from just a humor standpoint, he for the most part told it like it is,” Cudlitz said. “So to lose them both at the same time was, for me as a fan, was sort of like, ‘Oof, that’s rough.’”

In addition to his return as director on TWD Season 10, Cudlitz has hinted at Abe’s return to TWD Universe.

It is now Spring, a few months after the end of Season 9, when our group of survivors dared to cross into Whisperer territory during the harsh winter. The collected communities are still dealing with the effects of Alpha’s horrific display of power, reluctantly respecting the new borderlines being imposed on them, all while organizing themselves into a militia-style fighting force, preparing for a battle that may be unavoidable. But the Whisperers are a threat unlike any they have ever faced. Backed by a massive horde of the dead, the Whisperers are seemingly a fight the survivors cannot win. The question of what to do and the fear it breeds will infect the communities and give rise to paranoia, propaganda, secret agendas, and infighting that will test them as individuals and as a society. The very idea of whether civilization can survive in a world filled with the dead hangs in the balance.

The Walking Dead Season 10 premieres Sunday, October 6 on AMC.