Jeffrey Dean Morgan Reacts to Negan and Simon Reunion on TWD: Dead City

[This story contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Dead City season 1 episode 4.] There were returns. There were reunions. And there was revenge on Sunday’s “Everybody Wins a Prize” episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City. In the present, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) plotted to lure out the Croat (Željko Ivanek) from his new Sanctuary in New York City, save her son, and kill the man Negan once failed to put down like “a rabid dog.” But it was a trap: the Burazi unleashed a walker horde on the infiltrators as the Croat had his long-awaited reunion with his former Savior leader. 

In the past, a flashback to the Sanctuary revealed the moment the Croat went “too far” and got himself excommunicated from the Saviors. We saw Negan with his leather jacket. We saw Negan with his barbwire-wrapped baseball bat Lucille. And we saw Negan with his right-hand man, Simon (Steven Ogg), in a scene-stealing cameo that saw him calling the Croat a “Slavic, psychopathic nutjob” for torturing a young girl to death — a line Simon said the Saviors don’t cross.

“I was so happy to get a chance to bring Steven back. What an amazingchoice — out of all the people in this universe we could have had comeback, to have Ogg come back. I’d take him back any f—ing time,” Morgan told EW about Ogg’s surprise cameo. “It wasso good to see him. And Steven is one of the funniest people you willever meet. That guy’s a trip, man. He is a laugh, he is a poet, and he’san individual that is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. I just adore him, soI feel really lucky to have had him come back. He can have his ownf—ing series just doing anything and I would watch it.”

Morgan noted that the typically chatty Negan didn’t have any lines in his scene with Simon. Instead, his power-grabbing lieutenant talks about putting the “kibosh” on extracting information from a drifter who had holed up down the road from the Sanctuary. But the Croat, believing her to be a spy sent by the Kingdom, disobeyed a direct order to let her go — and forced a confession through his lethal extraction “process.” 

“We did a rehearsal of that scene just to getour places where the camera needs to see us,” Morgan said. “And itwas the first day I’d worked with Željko in the whole series as well.During the rehearsal, Steven went full Ogg, and I remember looking atŽeljko, because he realized pretty quickly, ‘Oh s—.’ And so in therehearsal, these two guys are going at it 120 percent. And I was sittingthere just watching this going, ‘Oh, f— me. I don’t know what they’regoing to do when the cameras are actually rolling because they’re notrolling right now and they’re going to kill each other!’ It wasspectacular. I’m glad I got to be a spectator on that one and just sortof feel it all.”

New episodes of The Walking Dead: Dead City premiere Thursdays on AMC+ and Sundays on AMC.

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