Watch Kevin Smith Impersonate Negan From 'The Walking Dead'
If for whatever reason, Jeffrey Dean Morgan ever has to drop out of playing Negan on The Walking [...]
If for whatever reason, Jeffrey Dean Morgan ever has to drop out of playing Negan on The Walking Dead, AMC may have an understudy in director Kevin Smith.
Smith showed his chops as Negan during a recording of his Hollywood Babble-On podcast with Ralph Garman. The podcast received an email from a fan who had received a kidney transplant after needing dialysis and being on the transfer waiting list for some time. The fan had named her kidney "Jackie Bouvier Kidney," after Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who was born Jackie Bouvier.
In the email, the fan has a request for Smith to wish her kidney a happy one-month birthday as Negan from The Walking Dead. Smith obliges and actually does a pretty decent job, punctuating his dialogue with a lot of long pauses. Check out the video above.
Smith's impersonation of Negan keys into Morgan's unique interpretation of how the antagonist should behave, something that Morgan feels strongly about.
"I have to be careful because the writers have so much fun with Negan and his dialogue that I have to be very careful in kind of tampering that dialogue in places to keep it open to other interpretations, because everybody wants him to be this big bad but I just can't play him like that," Morgan said in a previous interview. "I refuse to, and there's more to him than that. This year Gimple and I are on a mission to find him in there.
"And you know, I always am hoping that, at some point, we do a backstory episode for Negan, because it's an amazing story," he said. "I don't know that that's going to happen this year, but we are going to see enough of him and he talks quite a bit, as you know. So he's going to reveal some of himself to the audience this year, which is going to be awesome. It's going to be fascinating. Of course, he's still going to be a big f—ing dick!"
The actual Negan was conspicuously absent from last night's episode of The Walking Dead, as "All Out War" began between his Saviors and the Alexandria-Hilltop-Kingdom alliance, but he'll surely be back to his old tricks before too long.
The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.