In the years since Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan first arrived in all his fuckity-fuck glory on The Walking Dead — and I’m talking both real-world years and canonical years — the actor and the franchise’s various creative teams have gone to sometimes absurd lengths to prove to viewers that the guy who murdered Abraham as an appetizer to bashing in Glenn’s brains isn’t actually all that bad of a dude. Sometimes it’s come from his arguably virtuous actions, and sometimes it’s been shoveled into our ears via the former antagonist’s back-patting speeches. The spinoff Dead City provided the latter approach in its latest episode, and Morgan himself shared his thoughts on how accurate Negan’s history lesson was, though I’m not all that convinced.
During The Walking Dead: Dead City’s second installment, Negan and Lauren Cohan’s Maggie were taken in by a group of survivors being tracked down by Željko Ivanek’s villain The Croat, sparking a history lesson about the villain’s time within the Saviors. Negan attempted to paint The Croat as the group’s biggest monster for taking things too far with a child survivor, all while saying his own actions as the Saviors’ leader were only for the greater good of keeping his people safe, and that his more extreme actions were more performance than reality. Speaking with TVLine about the new project, Jeffrey Dean Morgan shared his thoughts on how much both he and his character bought into those claims. In his words:
I mostly think that’s true, and I believe that Negan believes it to be true. [That’s] his modus operandi as far as surviving this apocalypse, and he does excuse himself in certain places, obviously. He doesn’t think he’s the bad guy that he maybe is at times. But he absolutely believes that he has to put on a show, and that brings out the worst because it protects people. That is a Negan truth. Do I agree with that? Not always, no.
Considering everything we know about Negan’s transition from the comics to the small screen, and what we’ve seen, this isn’t a totally bullshit take or anything. The character has always held strong to a sense of theatricality and showmanship, albeit with differing intentions from one era to the next. But I think the more questionable idea there is whether or not Negan ever believed his performances were a means of non-violent threats. Because to me, the show and the violence came part and parcel, with plenty of proof of his core callousness on display. Abraham and Daryl’s fates aside, he still did awful shit to otherwise decent characters — enter: Dwight’s face — had a harem of wives, and almost definitely wouldn’t have found anywhere near the same sense of redemption if not for Team Family taking him down and imprisoning him.
Plus, “Who’s There?” featured Negan raining a dude’s intestines down onto others as just more of him putting on a show — definitely gonna be a splash zone warning for that show — which was reminiscent of the time when he disemboweled Spencer during his trip to Alexandria in Season 7. That’s what someone does when they’re the monster.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan brought up the idea that Negan has performed lots of good and championable acts over time alongside the “questionable-at-best” moments, but that those don’t get the same kind of recognition.
He’ll do something great, then take five steps back, and do people know about it? Probably not, sometimes they do. But Negan is not a bad guy in Negan’s eyes at all.
Understanding that The Croat likely wasn’t a glimmer in any Walking Dead writers’ eyes in the years before Dead City came into existence, and thus wasn’t a consideration for Negan’s character development, I think there’s a somewhat easy takeaway here that can match up properly. Since Negan's backstory showed him off as being kind of a douche, instead of a horror show, it's likely that he was initially put off by The Croat's initial actions, but then adapted his own behavior to become more extreme over time. Though obviously never allowing for that connection to hold true when reflecting on his own actions, while still holding judgment against his former interrogator.
Given it'll be a bit difficult to show himself off as a good guy in the weeks after showering guts in front of Maggie, Negan has his work cut out for him throughout the rest of The Walking Dead: Dead City's run. Check out new episodes airing every Sunday night on AMC, and stay tuned for all the other upcoming Walking Dead shows that are still on the way.
