Why The Walking Dead’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan Will “Never Ever Forget” Shooting Abraham’s Death Scene

The Walking Dead stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Michael Cudlitz were bonded for life when Cudlitz’s Abraham, after taking a blow from the barbwire-wrapped baseball bat wielded by Morgan’s Negan, defiantly told his killer: “Suck my nuts.” Abraham uttered his final words in the Season 7 premiere, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” where Abe and Glenn (Steven Yeun) were the victims pulled from a lineup that included a captured Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), Daryl (Norman Reedus), Michonne (Danai Gurira), Glenn’s then pregnant wife Maggie (Lauren Cohan), and Abraham’s longtime apocalypse companions Rosita (Christian Serratos) and Eugene (Josh McDermitt).

“I didn’t know who I was gonna kill and I didn’t know until we came back the next year. It was that kinda cliffhanger,” Morgan recalled on the latest episode of new AMC series Friday Night In with The Morgans, where Cudlitz appeared over video chat alongside former Walking Dead star Sarah Wayne Callies.

The Walking Dead‘s sixth season finale, “Last Day on Earth,” Morgan’s first episode, ended with the Savior leader bludgeoning an unidentified victim with “vampire bat” Lucille. Abraham would be revealed as the victim months later in the Season 7 premiere, which adapted Glenn’s horrific death from issue #100 of creator Robert Kirkman’s comic book.

“Mikey knew, and he kept asking me, ‘Do you know? Do you know who?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I think Steven, because that’s what’s written in the comic book,’” Morgan said. “Mike kept giving me this look with a little glint in his eye, and I’ll never, ever forget when we shot it, when Mike [improvised] the line, ‘Suck my nuts.’ It’s rare we kind of get to play with words a lot, but when Mike kind of got on his knees and he said ‘suck my nuts,’ and I got to kind of respond to that in a Negan way.”

An amused Negan laughed off the vulgar request with his best impression of the gruff Abraham, who was known for his off-color expressions.

“It just is a moment that I’ll never, ever forget in my whole life,” Morgan added. “It just was our kind of a moment that we got to have, and I still to this day get baseball bats to sign that you signed that say ‘suck my nuts’ and it makes me fall on the f—ing floor every time.”

In a past interview, Cudlitz said the line was scripted and is often requested by fans during autograph signings.

“Obviously you hope that it does what it’s supposed to do which is momentarily distract you and remind you of Abraham the character, break the tension a little bit, because you had a lot more tension to go,” Cudlitz said. “But I don’t think we realized it would take off the way it did. We had a huge fan convention … thousands of fans. Everyone from little kids to 85-year-old grandmothers walking up to me and saying, ‘Hey, can you write suck my nuts on my picture’! I was like, ‘Yeah, sure!’”

New episodes of Friday Night In with The Morgans premiere Fridays at 10/9c on AMC. For all things TWD, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.