Jeffrey Dean Morgan Explains Why He’s Still Shocked At Negan Spinoff Announcement
Jeffrey Dean Morgan was more than a little surprised about the announcement for his The Walking Dead Negan spinoff and it's hard to blame him
This article is more than 2 years old
Though The Walking Dead might be drawing to a close on its final episodes, we are far from near the end of this franchise on the small screen. Not by a long shot. There are a couple of different spinoffs in the works around characters we’ve already met in this world. Though at least one guy is a bit shocked that we already know about them. That would be Jeffrey Dean Morgan who is set to reprise his role of Negan in a standalone story about the character. The actor didn’t seem to understand why The Walking Dead chose *now* to let everyone know the series was coming.
While Jeffrey Dean Morgan isn’t necessarily surprised by the idea of a Negan spinoff series, he for sure was taken aback by the timing of the announcement. That’s because it was let on before The Walking Dead finale that there would be a new series which takes place after the events of the main show. Why is that weird? Well because it lets on the fate of the characters before the series draws to a close, thereby removing some suspense around what will happen to them. Morgan was a guest on The Rich Eisen Show (via TV Line) and let on his thoughts about the timing of the announcement. Check it out:
“Now that we’ve announced that there’s going to be a spinoff, I guess we don’t need to die… Spoiler Alert, folks. Sorry! I’m still not sure why we announced that already. It was sort of a shocker to me.”
He’s not wrong. With the final run of episodes now underway for the last The Walking Dead season, a big part of the intrigue around the show was how things would turn out for certain characters. Namely, who is or isn’t going to make it when it’s all said and done. But as Jeffrey Dean Morgan said, the cat is mostly out of the bag. We know there is going to be a series, Isle of the Dead which will also include Lauren Cohan’s Maggie character. Why is this something of an odd pairing? Well, Morgan’s Negan beat Maggie’s husband Glenn to death. So yeah, there’s that though he has expressed remorse for his move to Maggie.
Isle of the Dead will apparently follow Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan’s characters as they make their way to what’s left of New York City in this post-apocalyptic world. The city has been mostly cut off from the rest of the world, making it an incredibly dangerous, though even more weirdly isolated spot on the zombie-filled map. It’s not totally clear how (or if) the rest of The Walking Dead sets up this little relocation, but there is almost for sure to be some chess piece moving along these lines.
And it isn’t just Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan who are getting continued stories in The Walking Dead universe. Norman Reedus’s Daryl and Melissa McBride’s Carol are also set to get a spinoff series of their own as well. That is set for a release sometime next year. That is a similar timeline for Isle of the Dead which will have six episodes in all. The Walking Dead’s second half of the final season is currently underway with 11 episodes remaining.
