Jeffrey Dean Morgan

0:00In Georgia, you know, Norma and I would ride around motorcycles a lot. And I remember we had stopped at this coffee place and we got a coffee. I had this old lady. She smacked me with her purse and started swearing at me, like dropping F-bombs. And it was like serious. I remember Norma was like, we got to go. Like, we got to get the hell out of here. Like, this is serious. Prepare your ears, humans. Happy, sad, confused begins now.

0:27Hey guys, it's Josh. Welcome to another edition of Happy Sad Confused. Today on the show, first time guest. It is Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Walking Dead, Watchmen, BVS, Invincible, The Boys, Grey's Anatomy. We cover it all. This guy is so effortlessly cool, as I told him, and just a decent, decent guy, a great conversation with one of my favorites out there. Thanks, guys, as always, for checking out the podcast. Remember to hit that subscribe button on YouTube, whatever podcast platform you're using, you know what to do. Before we get to Jeffrey Dean Morgan today, quick reminder, as always, if you like what I do, support us over on our Patreon, patreon.com slash happy said confused.

1:05We post every single episode early over there. We do bonus content when we can. We give you early access to our live events in New York and Los Angeles. Supporting us over there helps us make more over here. Jeffrey Dean Morgan doesn't do a ton of the long form podcast. So I'm thrilled he came on happy said confused that last. I've certainly chatted with him over the years, but never one-on-one. It's usually with Norman Reedus or Lauren Cohan. And today he was front and center, promoting primarily the new season of Walking Dead, Dead City, which is now in its third season. It is, by the way, getting the best reviews yet of the spinoff show.

1:41They've kind of like rejiggered the format a little bit. The relationship between Maggie and Negan is reaping great rewards. We also talk a bit about his new show on Amazon Prime, Sterling Point. his reality show Destination X he's a very busy guy but also this is a deep dive into his entire career his he was a bit of a late bloomer really not hitting it big until Supernatural and Grey's Anatomy in his mid-30s we cover that crazy moment in Grey's Anatomy that really kind of became a focal point in pop culture and of course being in things like Watchmen and BVS and as I said the boys, Invincible, and of course a ton on The Walking Dead.

2:21He's also just like a cool normal guy. Great, really easy to talk to, really funny, really smart. I'm so thrilled this happened. I know you guys are going to dig it. So without any further ado, here is me and the one and only Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, you're on Happy Say I Confused. Josh Horowitz, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. It's never happened before. We've talked in the past, but I've I've never had you. You're always with like Norman or Warren. I get you all to myself today. Yeah, I'm all yours and I can't wait. And I'm happy, sad, and confused. So it works.

2:55Did you come out of the womb this effortlessly cool, Jeffrey Dean Morgan? Did you come out with leather and sunglasses? I mean, I came out probably fighting and wanting to be cool, but it was something that I had to, I'm still growing into. I don't believe that. What were the awkward years for you? What was like if I had met you at like 10, 15? I remember my mom calling around to neighborhood moms and saying, hey, my son really needs friends. Junior high was rough on me. Okay. So those years were hard. And then I kind of came into my own maybe sophomore year of high school. Found sports, found the arts.

3:36Yeah, I found sports. and I kind of grew into maybe my awkwardness and and it's probably a little nerdy and you know a headgear braces the whole thing you know stick up those photos it was yeah our cry from the 70s were were rough on me well ever since then you've made up for lost time because you you yes you exude coolness I feel uh yes just a little cooler being in your proximity always um well I'm flattered but you're full of it but i appreciate it not true man not true look we were just talking we both uh just returned from the madness that is san diego we're both yeah both been doing that for probably i've been doing 10 15 years i'm sure you've done i think that i have been to i counted them at one point it was like 20 22 uh i missed last year but you know i'd always been there with something a horror film or whatever and then and then you know how many years of Walking Dead every year except for the COVID.

4:36Yeah. And then even then, I think we did a Zoom. Right. That weird thing is super weird. And then last year I didn't go. And then this year we didn't have Norman, which was very weird and awkward. I miss that. I think he makes me cool. How about that? You as a duo are one of my favorites, both on screen and in interviews. You are a lot of fun. We have so much fun together. I miss I miss working with him so much. and all weekend I was getting texts from him is there are people missing me he's got FOMO yeah I love it I'm like of course everyone misses you mostly me and he was like we're both the fans I'm like yes man everybody misses it must be surreal though for you because like you at comic-con the resume that look it's it's not up to us to any actor to anybody just it's written in the stars I don't know how it happens yeah but you have somehow accumulated this this resume filled with from Walking Dead to The Boys, Invincible.

5:34I mean, that's just stuff in the last couple of years. But yeah, I mean, Watchmen, The Losers. I've got a whole supernatural. Yeah, it is odd to have kind of fallen into the comic book world. And I'm not sure how it happened. I mean, I guess the first would have been Supernatural. And I had done horror films and stuff even before then that had gone to like a Comic-Con, small horror films that we do. But then when I fell into the world of comic books, I really fell in. And it was great. And, you know, for a long time I was in the DC universe. And then that went on to Walking Dead and the Robert Kirkman world.

6:22And, of course, you know, Kripke then brought me back to the boys. And God bless them. Did you grow up with that stuff? I mean were you yeah yeah my my favorite person in my life was my grandma and my my dad's mom and my dad and his two brothers had massive amounts of comic books so I remember as a as a young boy staying with her and just getting to have you know a million comics yeah I wish to God that I had him now because it was oh my my comics my baseball cards if i had taken any kind of care of both of them you mean you both i'd have a little bit of a nest egg i had i had i didn't really have baseball cards but i had basketball cards yeah um but i had like a signed wilt chamberlain a signed pistol pete mare you know yeah and i never you know they were they were in those stick them books you know you couldn't even take them out once you put them in and dog-eared and but who knew i didn't know it 11 that no one none of us did.

7:25Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was basically, yeah, in junior high school, I was hanging out at the comic book baseball card shop every day after school, and little did I know it would be my career, basically. It really did pretty well for you. Oh, no, please. I skipped so much school to see movies when I was a kid, and now my mom's like, okay, it worked out. It's fine. So, like, when you're growing up, before you even knew that you wanted to make a go of this, like, what were the films and actors that you, or TV shows that you were obsessed with? I mean, westerns. I think my first love was probably westerns and it was shows like Bonanza and Gunsmoke and that stuff.

8:02It ages me rather quickly when I start throwing that out. But I remember watching Batman and I remember the very first Christopher Reeve Superman and that being such a big deal and kind of watching it come to life. but I didn't I don't think that I thought then even that it would explode into the world that it's become nobody taking over the film business really if you're gonna do a big movie these days it's usually a superhero film you know it's a cape involved somewhere have you done much I think you've done some western adjacent stuff I've done a couple westerns no I did I did a miniseries called texas rising it was me bill paxton ray liot i mean guys that i loved and that i miss dearly um and then i did a film with mads mickelson um called the salvation uh which is actually a gray and eva green um brilliant film um uh if i had done other westerns i i want to say i've been on a horse more than because that's all i ever want to do i'm constantly looking to get into that genre.

9:10They just don't make that many. They don't. I mean, you know, Taylor Sheridan's kind of tiptoeing around and I think all of his shows are very much based on kind of the theme of a Western. Yes. I could see you fitting into Taylor Sheridan. Yeah, yeah. I just had a meeting with those guys just to talk about, you know, future stuff. But yeah, I would, look, throw me on the back of a horse with a six gun on my hip and it's less dialogue for one cowboys don't do a lot of talking but I just love it it's a place that I'm real comfortable one of one of your kids is named after Gus McCray right from well that's right Gus well and George is named after a Bonanza episode called a girl named George it was Gus the Robert Duvall yeah yeah yeah yeah I go sis McCray did you ever meet Duvall before he passed no I mean I would be my favorite actor maybe ever but never met him I always hoped to have met him after especially after Gus was born although I was trying to imagine how I would say that to him without sounding like a complete stalker weirdo but you know everything that I know about him people I know that have worked with them have the greatest things to say about him what a wonderful man he was and what a giving actor and and no bullshit kind of guy yeah like he and Hackman are those two for me yeah the most like naturalistic actors yeah they never a word never escaped their mouth that I didn't believe.

10:38I agree with you completely. So, you know, put the two of them together and stuff and there's heaven. But, you know, Hackman was in some of the greatest westerns ever as well and he's, you know, he's just named two of my, well, maybe my top two actors as well. More Happy, Say, Confused coming up.

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13:39You have a lot of things to talk about because you're a busy man. It seems like you're always working when you're not at the farm, perhaps, but you just came from Comic-Con, as I said, promoting. Yeah, I mean, so did you. Have you talked about your Comic-Con? Not on the podcast yet, but this is about you today. I had a fun Ryan Gosling moment. Well, you had a moment kind of running the whole Marvel friggin' universe for a moment there. I'll take it. It was really cool. Hey, audience, if you haven't seen it, go watch the Marvel panel and see Josh in action because it was pretty great. But you were there with Lauren and company talking about the third season of Dead City.

14:18You could never have fathomed you'd still be playing this character and find it as rewarding all these years in. I still can't fathom that I'm doing it. No, originally, you know, I had been doing kind of like hit and runs. I'd go do a year on a show and then I'd go right to another show. And it was fun. I liked it because I was doing something different all the time. And I remember when Scott Gimple called, he runs The Walking Dead World, and he was showrunner at the time. and it was just a very vague offer. We are offering you this role that is the big bad. But I was a fan of the comic book and I was a fan of the show and I knew exactly where they were in the story.

15:01So I knew immediately there was Negan. But it was originally, I think, a two-year commitment. And I was like, I can do that. They were doing 16 episodes a year. I was like I because I hate being away from home sure uh it's hard I at that time it was just Gus and George wasn't around yet that's how long I've been there I've had a whole nother kid who's now in third grade uh and so I was like well two years sure and that kind of came and went and and then uh you know when the show originally it was Norman was going to go do his show And then Lauren and I were, we were called by, I think, Dan McDermott maybe and Scott.

15:48And they were like, well, we're going to have you and Lauren take over the main franchise. You'll be the heads of the new franchise. And we weren't splitting off. And then suddenly Walking Dead was canceled by AMC. But in the same sentence as that was, we would like you to do your own show. and they had kind of said the same thing to lauren as well uh in fact they did and they were looking at different ways to do different spin-offs and then they came to us with this idea of pairing the two of us together which which i you know i i at first i kind of laughed i'm like there's no freaking how's that gonna even work yeah how would that even work and i think that was kind of the main thing and i think that was the whole point was we don't know yet um but we find it a very interesting way to start a show where your two leads kind of hate each other and and then they were like and it shoots in new york sold and that was that was it i didn't even care what the idea was then i'm like well i get to be home uh and it turned out we never shot in new york we shot in deep jersey and now for the last two years we shot you know in the boston area you're still close so we're not talking yeah yeah no that's it's yeah yeah that's the key i can get in my car and be home in like four hours so i can see him on weekends but it also just must be rewarding like this new season's getting great reviews the best yet for this spinoff yeah and i know you you and loren have talked about like you know there's only so much meat on the bone to kind of play out that relationship yeah after all i think we beat it to death right you got it you nailed it yeah yeah yeah i think we were a couple years late uh to be honest with you um so what's what has it been a shot in the arm to kind of like find a new dynamic between the two of you this year certainly It was great to shoot because we got to, you know, we've been kind of doing variations of the same theme for 10 years, the two of us.

17:41And so that's where kind of Negan was stuck with this Maggie character. So then to do this spinoff that, you know, it started off the spinoff, I think, for the first part of the first year. Okay, there's going to be some movement here. and then I felt like last year we really got bogged down in season two Negan especially from my point of view all I did was cry and he lost his charisma and you know everything that made him Negan and I called Dan McDermott who runs AMC and I was like from my trailer after the last day of filming of season two and I said I can't do it like this anymore yeah um and it's been awesome and thank you and i love you and and that started a whole another conversation before you run off jeff uh is there a way we can shift this and and make it a show that we all think it can be yeah uh so you were fully prepared to walk away yeah and um and i think lauren was there also um i was just the first one to call and i'm really quiet about i I don't often call anybody.

18:54They know it's something. Yeah, yeah. If I'm calling, there's something going on. And luckily, we brought in Seth Hoffman, who I think injected so much. And I remember having my first phone conversation with him kind of one-on-one. And, you know, what are you looking for? What do you want to do? And I was like, well, the dynamic has to change. There has to be more to it than she wants to kill me. and I'm trying to make her not kill me and talk her out of it and save her. All friends are peeing. Yeah, yeah. We've done it. And then I just wanted Negan back. I wanted his humor and charisma and his smartness back in the show because I felt like it just vanished.

19:39And we were able to do that. So when you look back at the beginning days, so you were a fan of the comic, you knew the character. Besides the scripts and the comic, were there any other inspirations for how you approached me yeah in the early days um i you know really initially uh shooting especially that first scene because we shot and it was just me talking you know the the come out of the winnebego and do my thing um but it was like 10 pages of of of a monologue essentially and really what I did was whatever I saw the other actors react to whether it be that lean I remember doing that lean for the first time and watching Andy get this look of Andy Lincoln who played Rick Grimes get this look on his face like what the fuck is he doing like I could see him get uncomfortable with it and I leaned into it I'm going to lean into the lean I really leaned into it and it became like a thing.

20:45So it was a lot of that. But, you know, the comic book ultimately is the best foundation you can have. And I learned that really with Zack Snyder. Because on Watchmen, we never looked at a script. Ever. It was... Well, that one in particular. I mean, his mission statement, and he said it very overtly, was like, I'm going to make it a comics act. Yeah. It was a faithful adaptation. And he did. Like, you were torn out of those pages. You were a comedian. Yeah. I mean I remember like you know I'd go back to where you know he was and it would just be it's his dog-eared version of Watchmen the graphic novel and I'd turn to the page and like I got to do that I want I wanted to like stand like that or whatever it was I wanted to you know make it and also we had like Dave Gibbons there who drew the comic book and I didn't want to fuck with him either yeah um and we all felt that way uh i will say we'll come back to walking dead but since you brought it up i i love that film and i particularly love like the opening of that film i do too the credits well the credits and your your deaths oh okay yeah that's the first thing we shot those first 15 minutes are as as dynamite and open to a comedy film ever and they and they make you feel like you know for you know watchman has its critics and it's people that love it but like you can't argue that he made the comic no he sure did i mean you know the ending's a little bit different um and we kind of knew that going in a giant octopus was going to be tough to do especially then yeah in 2007 when we shot it um i mean i watched i watched part of the film recently with my son and i was kind of laughing at the cgi of it all then it just doesn't match up to what we see that's now even what kids are doing on youtube well that's it's crazy um but i that that opening sequence and going into that the fight with ozymandias and the death of the comedian uh those were the first things we shot and like that fight uh i remember it took like eight days and i you know i'm you came from the world of television really at that point right and so eight days is a full episode and and uh i remember i was that was the old version of the comedian so i had all the prosthetics on so i would go into work at two in the morning to start the makeup process the rest of the cast came in at eight must be nice yeah yeah yeah and uh so that first week i remember i was working you know 20 hour days uh and i was like oh shit I'm not going to make it through this film you know I got another five months to go uh and Zach was Zach after that realized and he was like all right we're gonna have to shoot you and then give you a day off or shoot you and and that's kind of what we did the rest of the film and but god that was so much fun so so back to Walking Dead because I do want to mention it in the context of like you've you've been at the focal point of like these like crazy pop culture moments a few times in your career yeah we can talk it's it doesn't happen often so many actors let alone you've had multiple like you know we can talk about graze in a bit too but like with walking dead it's pretty early on in that run that you bash you know you kill a couple very key characters in the most brutal of ways and you knew what you were signing up for that's kind of like the fun of it i guess in a way right yeah i certainly wasn't scared of it you know so what Did that affect, like, I don't know.

24:17I mean, people are smart enough, I hope, to not conflate you and the character. Oh, no. I still get it. Really? I still get hate. I still. What do you get? Oh, I get people all the time that are just furious with the fact that I killed Glenn. He was so loved. And I never understood how they didn't know it was going to happen. Like, Glenn was, I thought, a gimme. Abraham was a bonus, you know. but uh the glam of it all you know died in the comic books uh and that had come out four years prior um and so i was kind of shocked with the amount of people that wanted just suck the air right out of them but that just hated negan and jeffrey dean with fervor with fervor i mean what's the most extreme yeah what have you got it uh i mean i've In Georgia, Norma and I would ride around motorcycles a lot, and we'd go to various places.

25:12And I remember we had stopped at this coffee place, and we got a coffee. I had this old lady come. She was old. She was probably 80. And I remember she was with her granddaughter, who was super excited to see Norma and I. But when she saw me, the older lady, she smacked me with her purse and started swearing at me, like dropping F-bombs. And it was, like, serious. I remember Norman was like, we got to go. Like, we got to get the hell out of here. Like, this is serious. But I still can walk down the street in New York today. We could go out right now, and someone's going to yell at me and flip me off.

25:48And yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hilarious. I mean, I've gotten so used to it now that it's part of the deal. And if you go online, I don't anymore. but it's tremendous the amount of hate that Negan has. It's a good 50-50 split or people love to hate him. It means you did your job. It's also just as disturbing the flip side, the people that find him, I guess, is a testament again to the effortless charm that he's like the sexy character to some people and then that's disturbing in some ways too. Yeah, that's got its own issues. Yeah, yeah. And it seems to be kind of split 50-50. You know, I think there's something very interesting about Negan.

26:31I think taking someone that does something so terrible in the show, it's hard to say that he's necessarily a villain if you break down this apocalyptic world, because then everyone is. Everyone's just trying to survive. Everybody's murdered somebody. But he came on the show and fucked with our main cast, and those were the audience's heroes, and killed two of them. And so I get it, but at the same time, if you're such a fan of the show and this world, but you don't expect people to think logically, and that's not going to happen. And so I just kind of, it's this now. I used to really defend Megan.

27:13Let's sit down and have this ad. Yeah, and now I'm just like, hey, it's whatever. All right, hate me, keep watching. It's paying my bill, so it's okay. Yeah, and that's why I think this year's kind of so interesting, and it'll be fun to see if the audience understands Maggie's decisions to kind of work with him. Right. Now it's about like, wait, do I forgive her for like betraying me? Right. Yeah, now she'll get the shit. Right. Yeah, or not. And maybe it'll turn the audience and they'll be able to see, you know, pass some of the stuff and understand that these are two people that there's a certain level of trust that they have built.

27:55They've known each other longer than anyone else. And, you know, Negan has done a lot to clean up and try to fix what he's done. But he's always going to live with the guilt and she'll never forgive him. But we still find a way to move past it. More Happy Say Confused coming up.

28:18The war is over and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight. But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old school adventuring at its most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time and when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s, and man, it is so good to be back.

29:01Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the shadow dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on youtube.com slash the glass cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark.

29:19Hi, I'm Whitney. And I'm Katie. And we're the hosts of True Crime Campfire. We set out to make a true crime podcast we'd want to listen to. We get right to the story. We don't do a lot of extra talking, and when we do, it's usually to roast the short hairs off of some loser, murderer, or scammer. You'll laugh, but only at the people who deserve it. Like, which serial killer would you most like to shove into a locker? BTK and his awful poetry. Dude got caught because he didn't understand what a floppy disk was. we look for the stranger than fiction stories like the case of patty james a killer catfish before the internet was even a thing or howard walmsley a sentient wad of damp laundry who convinced his town he'd won the lottery fleeced local businesses out of thousands and then became a romance scammer we've covered tons of cases you've never heard of cults scammers killers so come find your next great binge listen to true crime campfire on apple podcasts spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

30:16New episodes every Friday.

30:21When you look at, like, kind of the arc of your life and career, like, do you consider yourself, like, a late bloomer in a way? Yeah, certainly. Because if you look, I guess, doing the math, like, supernatural, greys, you're in mid-30s around there? I was, I think, 38-ish, 38 maybe. But it was so, I got supernatural, greys anatomy, me and weeds all at the same time right all like i mean within a week of each other and after like 10 15 years oh episodic just like oh my god just fighting it you know um wanting to quit and you know i do a pilot every now and again and and you know guest star spots and uh you know movies that people have never heard of that might take me to comic con though um you know were you having to do side hustles even into your 30s always always side hustling you know i would you know build fences or whatever um it usually had involved hammers you know there was always something to build for somebody um were you setting like markers like if i don't get this by this well here was the problem and the problem was i was in my mid-30s and i didn't have an education and i you know i didn't know what else to do i did an episode of uh and people have heard me say this before of one of the star treks i don't know which one um but i played a zindi alien oh yeah i looked it up i saw oh fuck and i hated it so much that i wanted i i was like that's it i've got to do something else you're in that makeup trailer recovered by like all this prosthetic yeah and i just it was i I remember I was so claustrophobic, not to mention you couldn't eat, and I was in it for 14 hours a day, and it just was an experience that I want to forget, and I still wake up sweating about it.

32:17But I was like, done. But at the same time, I was like, what am I going to do? Like, I don't know anything else. I had a brief career in my Seattle days of, I had moved to New York, and I got involved in some graphic art, went back to Seattle and kept doing that and was doing like posters for my friends rock bands and having like art shows at bars and I could kind of stay alive that way I could sell a painting for 300 bucks and that would pay my rent for the month yeah um and so I did that but I had it you know my dad used to laugh and say I you know I could count 100 jobs that you've had not acting jobs early in my life that just helped me pay the bills but I remember being in my mid-30s going this didn't work out.

33:04And my manager had just fired me right before I got the three shows. And I'd been with her forever. And she was like, you've aged out, bro. You missed your window. And she got rid of me and Max Martina. Yep. And at the same time, and said the same thing to both of us. You dudes are old. And Max and I are looking at doing a film together right now, in fact. But we still talk about it. And we both will never forget that phone call. So he's a friend from way back when I know Billy Burke is also maybe your old staffing friend. I just talked to Billy Burke today. Yeah. Yeah. When I was covering Twilight, I would see Billy Burke a lot.