Jeffery Dean Morgan says ‘Negan’ snuck into his ‘Rampage’ role

That iconic whistle just seems to follow us everywhere! If you happen to see just a little bit of The Walking Dead star Jeffery Dean Morgan’s character of Negan in his Rampage performance, you are not the only one – he sees it himself as well!

In the film, Morgan stars as Agent Harvey Russell opposite Dwayne Johnson and some even larger-sized screen partners in director Brad Peyton’s adaptation of the Rampage video game franchise.

In a recent interview with EW, Morgan talked about how doing a monster movie was certainly something he needed to check off his list:

“I grew up watching like Godzilla and King Kong, so one of the reasons I became an actor was so I could do a monster movie. I hadn’t gotten to do a monster movie yet, and then, you throw Dwayne into the mix and I know his track record, he’s got a little bit of a Midas touch going, so it seemed like a no-brainer.”

Morgan’s character is an eccentric government operative who has been tasked with taking down the genetically mutated and enhanced monsters that are terrorizing Chicago. Since Morgan has been busy with the latest season of the hit AMC series The Walking Dead it was by glorious chance that he was able to film both simultaneously – both Rampage and The Walking Dead were filmed in Georgia.

Understandably, jumping back and forth between film sets had to be quite exhausting. It wasn’t until seeing the film that some “Negan-isms” might have snuck into his Rampage performance:

“When I was watching the movie the other night, I saw a couple body movements that look kind of familiar, a little lean here and there. I was like, ‘Oh man, there could have been a little slop over there between Negan and Russell.’”

Despite playing the big baddie of The Walking Dead, Morgan wants people to know that he isn’t always the ‘bad guy’. In fact, in Rampage Russell isn’t the villain at all. For the time being, he hopes to stay away from playing more ‘bad guy’ roles. Well, with the exception of our wicked-yet-you-can’t-help-but-love-him Negan!

 “I think now as soon as I walk onto the screen, people are like, ‘Uh, oh, he’s going to be the baddie’. I don’t know that I would want to be a villain right now in anything other than what I’m doing. I worry that with The Walking Dead, people will only know me as Negan because it’s such a pop culture phenomenon of a show and character. People have forgotten about all my other work as soon as I became Negan and they seem genuinely surprised that I don’t carry Lucille around and torture people in real life. So yeah, let me do something different.”

Rampage, which also stars Naomie Harris and Joe Manganiello, is in theaters now.