If there’s one villain from The Walking Dead that has stuck in viewers’ minds, it’s Negan. He’s brutal and loves to make fun of other people. But did you know that he was a real villain even before the apocalypse?
Who is Negan Smith? Negan Smith first appeared in season 6 of The Walking Dead and made an immediate impression, delivering one of the saddest deaths in the show’s history. Nonetheless, he remains a beloved character.
This is mainly due to actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays the arrogant and brutal leader. In addition to his baseball bat Lucille, one of his great characteristics is that he always makes fun of his victims. And he even did this before the apocalypse, as one comic reveals.
Negan is also in the last season:
Negan has tortured people before
In 2016, the spin-off comic Here’s Negan was released. The spin-off tells the story of Negan before he met Rick Grimes and his crew. In the first chapter of the comic, we also learn what Negan did before the apocalypse. He was a table tennis teacher and worked at a school.
But nobody would have wanted him as a teacher, because in the comics you can see how, after beating a teenager, he starts insulting him. This is particularly unpleasant because he does it in front of the teenager’s friends. When asked why he does this, he says he just wants to be the cool teacher, it’s a joke.
Interestingly, we also learn in the comic that Negan had a wife, but he didn’t treat her very well either. In the comic, he is shown cheating on her, but eventually confessing his love to her anyway. But after a tragic diagnosis, Negan is forced to kill his zombified wife.
What does Jeffrey Dean Morgan think about Negan’s past? When Jeffrey Dean Morgan was preparing for the role, the prequel comic had not yet been decided, so he came up with a different backstory, as he revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
He explains how he sees Negan more as a car salesman. There’s not much to it. Like Rick, he’s someone who survived the apocalypse until then. Negan became an iconic character who was even a playable character in Tekken 7. If you can’t get enough of zombies, check out this list: 7 series like The Walking Dead