‘The Walking Dead’: Negan’s Scenes Need Two Takes For Clean and ‘Full-Octane’ Versions
The Walking Dead comic fans are still waiting for the entrance of super villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) in the television series, and it looks like at least some of the delays may be due to The Walking Dead‘s creative team struggling with the right way to introduce the character to the show. In fact, executive producers revealed to Entertainment Weekly that the long-awaited debut of Negan was filmed two different ways. Was this a case of The Walking Dead trying to keep fans from posting spoilers? While the show is notorious for fans stalking the set to post photos and spoilers from filming, it appears that in this case, The Walking Dead is filming Negan’s entrance two different ways for a whole different reason.
Morgan already discussed how important the language is to his character, Negan, and how The Walking Dead writers were trying to keep the character as true to the comic book as possible. Executive producer and special effects makeup icon Greg Nicotero essentially confirmed they are shooting double takes of Negan’s scenes in his comments to EW.
“Even back when Michael Cudlitz was cast as Abraham we were like, ‘Damn, how are we going to deal with Abraham’s dialogue?’ And I think Gimple went, ‘Yeah, Abraham’s dialogue is fine. It’s Negan that we’re going to have problems with because every other word of Negan’s is f—.’ There is a rhythm to it that even in some of the takes that we did. What I affectionately call the ‘f— takes’ have a completely different rhythm to them and a completely different feel. So while editing it, I was very careful to make sure that I preserved a lot of the performance without getting myself into trouble with the profanity.”
“I will say that my goal is for, at the very least, in some way — might not be all the time, and it might not even be directly through your TV box — that people will be able to get full-octane Negan. I’m still playing around with it, but I will say I do have the material two ways right now. I’ll see what I can do with it. One way or another I want people to see full-octane Negan. Will I be able to shoot every scene like that? Probably not, but to tell you the truth, I think we will get as close to the version of full-octane Negan as we can through some version of the show or another.”
This isn’t the first time The Walking Dead has done alternative takes due to profanity. In Season 4, when Rick’s group was still trapped in Terminus, Rick (Andrew Lincoln) told his companions that “They’re screwing with the wrong people.” In the Blu-ray DVD, let’s just say that “screwing” was replaced with another word, and you can probably figure out what that word was even if you don’t have the DVD.
Just how far will the writers and producers of The Walking Dead be able to test the TV censors? FX just pushed the limits by dropping a huge profanity bomb in their original series The People vs OJ Simpson, but some are saying they got away with that because the show airs at a later time and the profanity occurred late in the episode. (If you don’t watch the series, the profanity in question was when Sarah Paulson said “motherf—er.”)
How far do you think The Walking Dead will go with what they broadcast on TV? Here’s a preview of Sunday’s episode.
The Walking Dead airs Sunday nights on AMC at 9 p.m. ET, and you may want to put the kids to bed first.
[Photo by Gene Page/AMC]
