The Walking Dead ’s David Morrissey recently sat down with AMC’s Eli Rosenberg to talk about his character, “The Governor.”
On getting used to the hot Atlanta weather and harsh weather conditions:
“There’s an element about needing to know about the conditions: the heat and the humidity and the snakes and bugs and ticks. You have to have a little bit of an outward bound course before you start filming. But I do think those crazy brutal conditions add to the show — because the show’s all about that. It isn’t a comfortable place to be and that’s important.”
On creating a back story for his character, one of the modern horror and comics genres favorite villains:
“I feel that the Governor is someone who before the event was a pretty middle-management type guy. He didn’t have the status before … It’s all relatively new to him.”
The British actor uses music to get into the mindset to play The Governor:
“On every job that I do, I have some sort of playlist that I use … Of course different scenes require different moods and different music as well. At the moment I have a band called 16 Horsepower which I really like. Sometimes I throw a bit of jazz in there — John Coltrane and Miles Davis — something like that that can get me into certain moods. The Stones are always good to get me going. I can get into some Chet Baker, Art Pepper type stuff as well.”
Morrissey also shared that he usually has trouble getting his 17-year-old son excited about his roles, but not in the case of The Walking Dead :
“He’s usually quite blasé about whatever I’m doing … But when I told him I was doing The Walking Dead he was like, ‘No, you’re joking dad. That’s fantastic!’ It’s made me cool in my son’s eyes.”
You can read the full interview with David Morrissey on AMCtv.com and catch him as The Governor on The Walking Dead , Sunday’s at 9 pm on AMC. Head over to my recap of this week’s episode “ Walk With Me ” and let me know in the comments what you thought of The Governor’s debut!
