The Walking Dead: Henry Rollins auditioned to play Negan

Henry Rollins was a fan favorite to be cast as Negan on The Walking Dead, and the musician/activist actually auditioned for the role on the zombie drama.

Back when fans were trying to figure out who would be great to play Negan on AMC’s The Walking Dead, there were a lot of names being thrown around. Perhaps the most common person put into the fantasy casting was musician and political activist Henry Rollins.

While the role eventually went to Jeffrey Dean Morgan, that doesn’t mean AMC didn’t do an extensive search to find the right individual to play Negan. Among those who auditioned to be the barbed-wire baseball bat carrying bad guy was Henry Rollins himself.

It seems like Rollins should have been a slam dunk to earn the role. He looks the part. He has a great way of speaking and has no problem dropping obscenities. But there was one big part of the character that Henry Rollins told ComicBook.com that made the role not right for him.

"“Since I didn’t get the part I can tell you this. I was up for the role of Negan because Charlie Adlard, who worked on the comic book, based that guy on me and so I was a shoo-in for an audition. The internet was wild with speculation because in the upcoming season they were going to introduce the character. A woman that works in my office put my name and the character’s name into an internet search and all this speculation came up. I went for the audition and there were five pages of really cool dialogue with all these curses and it was beautiful, but I didn’t get it.”"

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Negan is a complicated character. Many of the things he does in The Walking Dead‘s comic book series aren’t necessarily evil, but he definitely has no problem crossing the line and doing bad things to help him and his people.

Thankfully, Rollins was open about not getting what the character of Negan was all about. Many people in Hollywood would snap up a role on a blockbuster program like The Walking Dead, but there aren’t a lot of celebrities with the kind of integrity that Henry Rollins has.

Rollins eventually saw that Jeffrey Dean Morgan would play Negan, and he thinks AMC got the right guy for the job.

"“I later saw a photograph of the guy who did get it and he looks almost exactly like the comic book rendering. The woman at my office watched the episode where he turns up, the dialogue that I auditioned with was in the show and she said, ‘It should have been you.’ Obviously it wasn’t or this conversation would be very different but that happened. I had to sign one of those documents where you can’t talk about it but now it’s over and done with… so yeah, I was up for that part.”"

Next: Who did Negan kill? Check out the odds here!

Negan could have been a bit different of a character with Henry Rollins in the role instead of Jeffrey Dean Morgan. However, after seeing Morgan’s performance in the season 6 finale of The Walking Dead, it’s easy to say that AMC made a great decision on casting Negan and he should continue to help keep the zombie survival drama as one of the most popular shows on television.

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