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:
