The Walking Dead’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lennie James Reveal Their Biggest Regret From the Show

Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lennie James share one regret from their time together on The Walking Dead: Morgan’s Negan never clashed with James’ Morgan Jones before he crossed over to spinoff Fear the Walking Dead. The wished-for meeting almost happened in the flagship show’s seventh season finale, “The First Day of the Rest of Your Life,” where an armed and staff-wielding Morgan joined the cavalry led by respective Hilltop and Kingdom leaders Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) to ward off a Savior and Scavenger invasion of the Alexandria community led by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln).

“I’ve always been a fan of The Walking Dead, before I was ever a part of this world I was a big fan. And I was a big fan, really, of you,” Morgan told James on the latest episode of video-chat show Friday Night In with The Morgans. “You were one of the people that always so stood out for me. So when I joined the show, I looked so forward to having some scenes with you.”

Calling the two characters “very interesting and kind of diametrically opposite in their way of thinking,” the Negan actor then asked James what might have happened if Morgan met Negan amid the bloody conflict between the militia and the Saviors.

“The two of them in the same room is never gonna be casual,” James answered. “It’s never gonna be a kind of, ‘How are you doing?’ It’s going to be a clash.”

“One of the things I regret most about my time on The Walking Dead, and I regret very little, is there are a couple of people who became friends, but we never actually got to do any scenes together,” James said. “You and [Abraham Ford actor Michael] Cudlitz are at the top of my list [of actors] that I’m just gutted I never got a chance to [work with].”

Added Morgan, “It never happened. I got there and then you left, and it’s one of my biggest regrets.”

There were just “two options,” James quipped: “Either leave and go to Fear, or do a scene with Negan and die!”

James exited The Walking Dead in its eighth season finale, “Wrath,” which ended with Negan defeated by Rick and sentenced to life imprisonment in the jail cell built by Morgan.

After travelling west and becoming the leader of his own group of zombie apocalypse survivors, Morgan was surprised to recognize a familiar face when the fifth season of Fear brought over ex-Savior Dwight (Austin Amelio). Negan’s former underling left Virginia on a one-man mission to find missing wife Sherry (Christine Evangelista), a search that comes to an end in the coming sixth season of Fear the Walking Dead.

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