Out There

What if the thing you're trying to hide is actually your greatest asset? Walking Dead star (and restaurateur, book publisher, and TV producer) NORMAN REEDUS knows all about that.

- JASON FEIFER

You're going to get a surprise," classmates kept telling Norman Reedus.

It was his first year of junior high, in Florida, and he was the new kid. He'd bounced around to a lot of schools, and his family didn't have much money, which made him stick out. Everyone in school wore the same cool pair of Nike high-tops, for example, but Reedus wore a beat-up pair of soccer cleats with a hole in the toe. Now the other kids were talking about a surprise-never a good sign.

At lunch, it happened: The kids gathered around Reedus as he sat at a table. One girl emerged, box in hand, with a bow on top. The kids cooed in unison. Reedus was nervous, but he opened it: Inside was a pair of Nike high-tops, the same as everyone else's. It was a gift. So he could fit in.

“I was mortified," he recalls now, at age 53, sitting in a rural Georgia parking lot near where he's filming the final season of AMC's The Walking Dead. “I loved my soccer cleats with the hole in the toe. I thought they were awesome. And I never wore the Nikes. I never put them on. I gave them away."

Reedus pauses. “I don't know why I just thought of that story," he says.

But I have a guess.

The kid with the beat-up soccer cleats grew up into an adult who identifies with rough edges. He is fascinated by the grotesque; he photographs roadkill, and once made a statue of himself in a box full of bugs and rats for an art museum. He has a lot of stories about hanging out with delinquents. He's gotten into a lot of fights. “I don't like nose jobs; I like people with an interesting nose,” he says.

It's why Reedus and I have been talking about the power of flaws-and how, counterintuitively, many people's greatest shames might also be the greatest source of their strength.