The Walking Dead: Dead City star Jeffrey Dean Morgan reveals how Maggie manipulates her old enemy Negan into helping her. Morgan’s Negan changed the game on the original Walking Dead when he murdered Abraham and Glenn in a moment so brutally violent, it actually chased off a lot of the show’s viewers permanently. Now in somewhat unlikely fashion, the semi-redeemed Negan is one of the characters carrying forward the TWD flag, as Morgan’s bad guy teams with Lauren Cohan’s Maggie for the highly-anticipated spinoff The Walking Dead: Dead City.
Coming on the heels of a new Walking Dead: Dead City trailer release teasing the show’s NYC zombie action, Negan actor Morgan is giving details about how the spinoff show’s unlikely team-up comes about. Speaking to EW, Morgan teased that the show begins with Negan in a lot of trouble, and explains how Maggie takes advantage of his situation to serve her own desperate ends after the kidnapping of her son Hershel. Check out what Morgan said in the space below:
"She kind of blackmails him into helping. She knows that he's a wanted man, so she's like, 'Look, I can help you get away. They're on your tail and we can get out of here. You help me save Herschel, and then I won't turn you in.' So it's maybe not starting off on the greatest foot."
Dead City Is Turning Negan Into Snake Plissken
The classic 1981 action movie Escape From New York has been cited by showrunner Eli Jorné as an influence on Dead City, and that influence can be seen again in the newest trailer, which teases the Walking Dead spinoff’s very Carpenter-esque post-apocalyptic world-building. But more than just taking visual and story cues from Carpenter’s movie, Dead City appears to be taking character pointers from Escape From New York as well, turning Negan into the show’s Snake Plissken.
The anti-hero at the center of Escape From New York, Kurt Russell’s Plissken memorably is dispatched to the prison of Manhattan to rescue the president, in exchange for a full pardon – basically the same sort of deal Maggie offers Negan in Dead City. But like Negan, Plissken is very hard to trust, and in Escape From New York, the authorities guarantee he sticks to the mission by injecting him with micro-explosives. It’s unlikely that Maggie has any micro-explosives on her, but she can still keep Negan on-task by accompanying him to zombie-infested New York on her desperate mission to save her son Hershel.
The idea of the unpredictable Negan as a useful if somewhat untrustworthy tool has of course come up before, most famously in the Walking Dead storyline where Carol dispatched him to The Whisperers’ lair to seduce and murder Alpha, and again later when Maggie used him to help her navigate through Washington DC on a food-gathering mission. Now it seems Negan is being turned into a full-on action-movie anti-hero in the Plissken vein, a move that could help The Walking Dead: Dead City fulfill its apparent intention of being the zombie franchise’s answer to Escape From New York.
Source: EW