LIFE after DEATH

As The Walking Dead heads into its final season, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is getting back to what he loves most—family, fast cars, candy and chickens.

- JESSE WILL

A SCORCHED, zombie-ravaged dystopia ain’t no place to raise your kids, but desperate times require desperate measures. So when the long-running AMC series The Walking Dead returned to shoot under serious COVID protocols a few months back in Senoia, GA, actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays Negan, a brutal, leather-clad anti-hero, brought the entire clan to live on set: “I had my whole family living in Alexandria, this apocalyptic, walled-off town charred and burned down from the season before. It was crazy.”

Morgan’s Air-b-and-zomb, as it were, happened to be the Rick Grimes house, the site of several on-screen brawls from prior seasons. Shotgun spray still pockmarked the walls where his 10-year-old son Gus slept; downstairs at breakfast, they’d pore over the damage wrought by Lucille, Negan’s weapon of choice, a barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat. It was a strange place from which to administer the online school, but, well, what’s normal these days?

“They fucking loved it!” says Morgan. “And having this 30-foot wall around the town was great, too, because I could let the kids and the dogs out. I knew they couldn’t go anywhere.”

This morning, Morgan is a few miles from that set, calling from his Ford F-150 Raptor—a pickup suitable for a zombie apocalypse—after driving it to get his daily COVID test. Shooting is underway for TWD’s 11th and final season, a monster 24-episode run that will conclude in 2022. “Let’s face it—this year has been hard for everybody,” says Morgan. “But getting back to some kind of regular work schedule has been a big relief.”