Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Negan Smith arrives on The Walking Dead in 2016 with a baseball bat and a great deal to say, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan says all of it with his teeth showing. The trick is that he is plainly enjoying himself. Other villains on the series glower; Negan talks, at length, and expects to be found funny, and the awkward thing is that he is. The series had spent six years on quiet dread. From the moment he walks in, every scene he is in runs on his rhythm rather than the show's.

He came to it late. Morgan had been taking small parts in film and television since the early 1990s and was in his mid-thirties before anyone much noticed him, first as Denny Duquette in Grey's Anatomy (2005–2009) and as John Winchester in Supernatural (2005–2008). Watchmen (2009) gave him the Comedian, a violent man played for something more than villainy, and it is the clearest early sighting of what he would later do with Negan. We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here. What they show is a career built on one instinct, the charming brute, arrived at slowly and then not let go of. Negan carried him through the end of the parent series and into The Walking Dead: Dead City (2023–present).

When we reviewed the series we said Morgan brightens it and coarsens it in the same stroke, and both come from the same decision. He plays menace as showmanship. The bat is a prop, the threats are a set, and whoever is in the room is his audience whether they like it or not. We laughed at him, more than once, and then felt uneasy about it, because the laughter came at the expense of the fear the first six episodes had worked so hard to build. He is most often set against Lauren Cohan's Maggie Rhee and Norman Reedus's Daryl Dixon, and the series kept those pairings for years, which tells you the writers knew where the friction was.

The cost is that he is now the man with the bat. The parts since have been the same shape: the big talker in genre television and comic-book pictures, the villain you are meant to enjoy. He has said he wanted a part that made people hate him: "Not to say I want people to hate me, but to do a role that elicits that kind of reaction is a big reason why I wanted to do it." The trouble, and it is a good trouble for an actor to have, is that nobody quite manages it. Watch the first six episodes of The Walking Dead for the horror, then skip ahead to him for the company, and do not expect to be frightened once he starts talking.