The Walking Dead: What do we know about Negan so far?

Readers of The Walking Dead comics have been waiting a long time for the arrival of Negan on the AMC show. The wait is almost over. What do we know so far?

Ever since the possibility of Negan entering the scene on The Walking Dead started coming closer, it has been the source of much speculation and anticipation. Things have really been heating up in the last few months.

On November 10, 2015, we got the news that Jeffrey Dean Morgan had been officially cast as the bad guy. The fandom, especially on Twitter, went wild!

Soon after the announcement, we heard from Jeffrey Dean Morgan himself about his own excitement at playing the role and how he found out. *Warning: Negan-like swearing included in this clip!

He visited the women of The Talk in December.  Aisha Tyler is a well known crazy fan of The Walking Dead and she was appropriately excited to speak to Jeffrey about Negan.

At the end of the midseason finale we heard the word Negan spoken out loud by some dude with a gang of motorcycle guys who stopped our Daryl, Sasha and Abraham and told them to surrender their weapons. He told them that all their property now belongs to Negan.  Whoa!

Morgan told TV Guide how he would approach Negan from an acting standpoint,  “I try to not look at characters as if they’re sociopaths when I’m playing them. I think they’re completely rational human beings!” He also feels comfortable with his killing partner, “I don’t mind handling a baseball bat! I feel real comfortable with Lucille in my hands, let’s say that.”

Morgan admitted to EntertainmentWeekly that the language is an issue they are working on. ” Look, it’s a speed bump. I’m not going to say it’s an issue because they’re working on it. We’re going to push AMC — the plan is to push them as far as they can because it’s who Negan is. He uses some colorful language. And I use some colorful language. And reading the comic, it’s important. So we’ll see where that lands. It’s our intention that this character is going to leap off the pages of the comic book. It’s very important that that’s who it is. Some of the characters there’s much more leeway, but Negan is a guy that you want to keep as true as possible, and that would be how I want to play him as well.”

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Gimple describes Negan as “one of the great pop culture characters of the past 20 years.”  He talked to TVLine about Negan’s personality. “He’s not nuts. But you can’t reason with him because he’s got it all worked out. He knows exactly the way the world works. And he’s the one in control. Negan also has a bizarre sense of empathy. He actually recognizes your bad luck in you running into him, yet it doesn’t change a damn thing.”

So as is par for the course in The Walking Dead land, we know enough about Negan to be terrified and really excited for season 7. We know “not enough” that we can keep guessing and speculating all summer long and we still have all of 6B to deal with Alexandria and the St. Valentine’s Day massacre that will start the second half of the season before even dealing with Negan.