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 amazing choice — out of all the people in this universe we could have had come back, to have Ogg come back. I'd take him back any f---ing time," Morgan told EW about Ogg's surprise cameo. "It was so good to see him. And Steven is one of the funniest people you will ever meet. That guy's a trip, man. He is a laugh, he is a poet, and he's an individual that is unlike anyone I've ever met. I just adore him, so I feel really lucky to have had him come back. He can have his own f---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 get our places where the camera needs to see us," Morgan said. "And it was 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 at Željko, because he realized pretty quickly, 'Oh s---.' And so in the rehearsal, these two guys are going at it 120 percent. And I was sitting there just watching this going, 'Oh, f--- me. I don't know what they're going to do when the cameras are actually rolling because they're not rolling right now and they're going to kill each other!' It was spectacular. I'm glad I got to be a spectator on that one and just sort of feel it all."
New episodes of The Walking Dead: Dead City premiere Thursdays on AMC+ and Sundays on AMC.
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