'The Walking Dead' Star Jeffrey Dean Morgan Goes Back to His Roots
As The Strolling Dead heads into its final time, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is having back again to what he loves most—family, rapid automobiles, sweet and chickens.
A scorched, zombie-ravaged dystopia ain’t no place to raise your young ones, but desperate occasions demand desperate actions. So when the prolonged-jogging AMC series The Strolling Dead returned to shoot underneath serious COVID protocols a couple months again in Senoia, GA, actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays Negan, a brutal, leather-clad anti-hero, introduced the complete clan to dwell on set: “I had my entire family residing in Alexandria, this apocalyptic, walled-off city charred and burned down from the year just before. It was outrageous.”
Morgan’s Air-b-and-zom-b, as it had been, took place to be the Rick Grimes residence, the internet site of various on-display brawls from prior seasons. Shotgun spray still pock-marked the partitions in which his 10-calendar year-outdated son Gus slept downstairs at breakfast, they’d pore in excess of the destruction wrought by Lucille, Negan’s weapon of alternative, a barbed wire–wrapped baseball bat. It was a weird place from which to administer online university, but, perfectly, what is ordinary these times?

“They fucking cherished it!” says Morgan. “And owning this 30-foot wall all over the town was terrific, too, for the reason that I could allow the youngsters and the pet dogs out. I realized they could not go any where.”
This morning, Morgan is a several miles from that established, calling from his Ford F-150 Raptor—a pickup suitable for a zombie apocalypse—after driving it to get his day-to-day COVID test. Taking pictures is underway for TWD’s 11th and closing season, a monster 24-episode operate that will conclude in 2022. You can also capture Morgan’s new film, The Unholy, a supernatural horror flick where he performs a journalist investigating a lady who can inexplicably heal the sick, in theaters April 2. “Let’s confront it—this calendar year has been really hard for everyone,” says Morgan. “But receiving again to some sort of typical do the job plan has been a large relief.”
While Morgan has starred in blue-chip Tv set sequence Grey’s Anatomy and The Excellent Spouse and played roles in movies like Watchmen, Rampage and The Losers, his portrayal of the nihilistic Negan stands as the actor’s defining job consequently far—jump-commenced by a cruel, cranium-smashing debut (with Lucille) that shocked and polarized TWD lovers significantly and wide when it aired in 2016.
“The initially few decades I was on this exhibit, I was concerned that Negan was pretty two-dimensional. I felt like just about every scene was an iteration of him coming out of that Winnebago,” Morgan says, just before pointing out that the character has ridden a sort of redemption arc of late. This summer months we’ll glimpse Negan’s backstory, as Morgan’s real wife, actress Hilarie Burton Morgan, portrays the character’s now-deceased wife (named Lucille). With the series’ conclude in sight, it is obvious that Morgan takes his character’s destiny personally.
“Negan has grow to be this kind of an crucial element of my life. It’d be hard to make a clean slice and walk absent. Until they just want to kill me. Just a knife in the back. And perhaps that is what desires to be carried out for me to stroll absent from this man.”
When TWD finally wraps, Morgan and relatives will pack up and head not for the hills of Hollywood, but Rhinebeck, NY, in the Hudson River Valley. There, on a 70-acre spread of woods, pasture and bluegrass, Morgan will go again to keeping a few outdated farmhouses and 40 animals, give or get, which include alpacas, llamas, chickens, ducks, puppies, cows and Paxton Dean Morgan, a donkey that thinks he’s a doggy. The Morgans connect with the assets “Mischief Farm,” but it could just as quickly be named, Morgan claims, “Shitshow. In the extremely finest way.”
“After 20-some several years in L.A., my everyday living took a diverse direction, and instantly, we purchased a fucking farm. It’s been the coolest issue that I’ve ever been a portion of. Most of the animals we have are all rescues, and they all have funky personalities. Any a person of them can be a soreness in the ass on any presented day.”

Pastoral lifestyle is a departure for Morgan, who grew up outside the house of Seattle. It’s also a return of sorts. “Since I was 6 or 7, my grandmother had a farm wherever I would spend weeks each individual summer, living in this dilapidated Airstream out with the cows. It was a Huck Finn sort of factor.”
In a standard working day at Mischief, Morgan may possibly shovel some donkey crap, stroll the 3-mile fence line, mending it if required, followed by a firewood chopping session. “I’m a little bit obsessed with it. I enjoy an ax, but I not long ago acquired a log splitter, which has altered my lifestyle as I near 55,” he suggests with a snicker. Then Morgan could possibly head down to Hackett Farm Supply, see what’s going on. Or he could check out the stock at Samuel’s Sweet Shop, a sweet retailer the Morgans co-own with Rhinebeck neighbor Paul Rudd and his spouse, and yet another companion. “It’s got everything you could potentially request for. But I however choose the previous-faculty stuff, Hershey with almonds.”
So, yeah—not only does Morgan get paid out to pretend to be a comic reserve villain, then goes dwelling to ride tractors and feed donkeys—he also owns a damn candy shop. At age 54, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is living each 9-year-aged boy’s aspiration existence.
“AFTER 20 Yrs IN L.A., MY Everyday living TOOK A Various Path AND WE Bought A FUCKING FARM.”
And right until currently, it’s been a pretty non-public one. Though Morgan is no stranger to the press circuit—he’s carried out almost everything from Comedian-Disadvantages to The Walking Lifeless cruises—he doesn’t go away a prolonged a path of gossip or confessional profiles. That’s by selection. “I’ve often been a private dude. I could give an entertaining push interview and lie about some funny story, but wouldn’t go further. For the reason that it’s my everyday living, you know? At the very least, that was my principle. Then she wrote the book.”
Morgan is referring to The Rural Diaries, Hilarie’s chronicle of meeting up with Morgan, adapting to everyday living on the farm and starting to be a parent. The book arrived out in spring 2020, and grew to become a New York Situations most effective-vendor. Not all of the book’s passages are as sweet as individuals covering the pair’s rescue of Rhinebeck’s sweet store, a type of civic excellent. She also writes of miscarriages, misunderstandings and taciturn stretches between the two. Morgan says he did not read through it until it was heading to the printer.

“The young children went to bed, and she handed me the galley and I sat in entrance of the fireplace and browse the whole reserve in five hours. She actually took a deep dive on our particular lifestyle and enable the planet know some stuff that I don’t know I would have. I was in tears. I woke her up and stated like, ‘Wow, I signify, I don’t know what to say. I’m so proud of you.’ ”
“I realized, I guess there’s not a ton there to cover any more. And I gotta tell you, there’s a lot of liberating variety of emotion that goes with that. Like a fat off my shoulders.”
So when COVID strike, Morgan experienced an strategy: Why not carry the veil even a lot more and carry the admirers to the farm? He and Hilarie identified as in a bunch of camera gear from AMC, and within two months the pair ended up shooting Friday Evening In With the Morgans, on which they’d give updates on farm life, verify in with overall health authorities and friends like the Rudds, TWD co-star Norman Reedus or the neighborhood comedian e book retail outlet owner—“see how they are doing and how they are sort of obtaining by way of this situation,” claims Morgan. The exhibit was short-lived, as so numerous of our group Zoom phone calls of spring 2020 turned out to be, but Morgan states that generating the demonstrate was a way to remain sane “in a time of shit.”
So he discovered other diversions, the fondest of them getting afternoon-extensive place street cruises with his now 3-year-previous daughter, George, in his custom made Dodge Challenger Hellcat, the snarl of its supercharged, 717-horsepower V8 motor drowned out by…father and daughter singing along to the soundtrack to Frozen. Since when you are confronted with the unanticipated, from time to time it’s best to permit it go.
The 1st fifty percent of Period 11 of The Walking Dead will premiere Summer season 2021 on AMC, with the next 50 percent to adhere to in 2022