“You are so beautiful to me.” Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) makes a heartbreaking discovery and burns down the past in the talked about scene from The Walking Dead‘s Season 10 finale. Spoilers for “Here’s Negan.” When Negan flashes back to the earliest months of the zombie apocalypse, he remembers his cancer-stricken wife Lucille (Hilarie Burton Morgan) and how he left her on a six-week search to find chemotherapy drugs. Negan gets home to find his wife has died by suicide and reanimated as a walker, but he can’t bring himself to put her down — so he sets their home ablaze to the tune of Negan and Lucille’s love song.
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The scene is the first time viewers find out what really happened to Lucille: Negan previously confessed to Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) that he was too “weak” to put his wife down when she turned, later telling others about his wife’s illness. But Negan never revealed that Lucille took her own life not long after he set off on his six-week quest to find medicine to treat her pancreatic cancer.
“I think she’s a really bright woman. I think the second she was diagnosed, she did a whole bunch of internet research, like any of us would. She knew what was coming,” Burton Morgan told EW about Lucille’s pre-apocalypse diagnosis. “Even though she was going through the motions of treatment, she absolutely knew what was coming and had indulged Negan’s fantasy that everything was going to be okay, but they’d reached the end.”
The Lucille actress added, “So rather than force him to make a hard decision, or force him to watch something that would be unbearable, she made a very difficult decision and took it out of his hands. Which, man, there’s so many layers to that decision, but being human is tough sometimes. Yeah, these two are an example of that. Everything is tough for these two.”
As for her transformation into a gnawing walker, the actress had fun playing a “really gross zombie.”
“I mean, these chunks of things missing from my face, and the contacts that they put on me were horrific. They’re terrifying. It was so fun,” Burton Morgan told ComicBook.com in a post-episode interview. “Normally I play characters that are in a pencil skirt. I played a lot of cops, or investigators and things like that, so to play a woman with no makeup, sitting around in her sweat pants, falling apart literally was really fun. I hope I get to do more of that.”
The Final Season of The Walking Dead premieres Sunday, August 22 on AMC. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD.
