Walking Dead’s OGG coming to comic-con, sans moustache
Steven Ogg calls it the “shave down.”
It was on live TV Sunday night when the Calgary-born actor had his impressive and instantly recognizable facial hair clumsily removed by host Chris Hardwick and fellow guests of Talking Dead, AMC’s recap aftershow that was largely focused this week on the spectacularly violent end of Ogg ’s character, Simon.
Hardwick had put it to a vote. Should Ogg lose the famous ’stache or not? Overwhelmingly, the fans wanted him to keep it. Ogg didn’t care. He wanted it gone.
So Hardwick, “superfan” Ashley Weidman and actress Christian Serratos, who plays Rosita, took turns with the electric razor. When Talking Dead returned after the commercial break, Ogg was more or less clean shaven.
Still, while it may be tempting to see this act as Ogg ’s symbolic, chapter-closing shedding of Simon, the actor admits it probably meant far more to fans than it did to him.
“I do not feel any different today than I did yesterday with the big, enormous moustache,” says Ogg, in a phone interview with Postmedia. “It’s just probably less recognition now that I don’t have that distinct moustache. But I don’t really care. It’s just facial hair.”
Still, it was a trademark for Ogg ’s scene-stealing and increasingly ambitious henchman character in The Walking Dead. Enough of one that when it came time to say goodbye to the crew in Atlanta, they all donned fake moustaches out of respect for his departure from the series. As fans know, Simon was in the midst of planning a failed insurrection against the rule of Negan, the baseball-batwielding chief antagonist for the past two seasons of AMC’s popular post-apocalypse series. Sunday’s episode revealed the depths of Simon’s depravity, something that has been building for much of the second half of Season 8. After showing an unusual amount of patience with his wayward righthand man’s brutal disobedience, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) finally challenged him to a gladiatorlike duel to the death that ended with Simon being fatally throttled. Our last view of him is in undead form, frothing at the mouth with his moustache nevertheless intact, impaled on the fence surrounding the Saviors compound that he used to help rule with an iron fist.
“It was this epic fight-to-thedeath scene, but much of the day you’re spending it hugging people,” Ogg says, about his final day on set back in November. “They had the moustaches and you just wanted to have a good cry. You’ve got to be a tough guy, but you really just want to say, ‘I’m going to miss you guuuuuuys!’ ”
Ogg says he found out his character’s fate in October 2017, which happened to be the same day that celebrations for The Walking Dead’s 100th episode were being held at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. He was told the news, as is tradition with The Walking Dead, by producer and showrunner Scott Gimple.
“When you do get the Gimple call, it means you’re not long for this world,” he says.
Still, Ogg says he was happy that he left the show with the same pizzazz that he entered it in Season 6, when he was introduced as a sociopathic but loyal second-incommand of the Saviors in the harrowing season finale. He immediately gained notice for the role, earning rave reviews as his presence, and brutality, increased over seasons 7 and 8.
“I had a nice arc in the second half of the season,” Ogg says. “I had a lot more to do. It probably would have been a little worse if I had just been in the background doing little errands for Negan here and there. It was nice to get such a big chunk, to work with different people in these episodes and to have this great little run at the end and then have this spectacular cannonball exit.”
Ogg will be making his Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo debut at the end of the month. While his involvement in The Walking Dead and HBO’s Westworld — where he plays an equally nasty robot “host” named Rebus — are more than enough to establish Ogg’s fan-con bona fides, he will actually be coming to Calgary as part of a panel for the video game Grand Theft Auto V.
Ogg, who attended Dr. E.P. Scarlett High School in Calgary and began his career as a model, first gained attention for his motioncapture performance as the sociopathic thug Trevor Phillips in Grand Theft. He will be joined by fellow GTA actors Ned Luke and Shawn (Solo) Fonteno. Ogg has been a regular presence at socalled Walker Stalker conventions around the world since debuting on The Walking Dead, but this will be only the second time he attends a convention on behalf of GTA.
“I still get a lot of people at the Walker Stalker conventions that are GTA, Trevor Phillips fans, which boggles my mind,” he says. “I’m like: ‘Isn’t that four or five years old? Don’t people move on from these things?’ But a friend just sent me a link today, it was on (IGN.com), that said GTA V has made more money than any film, book or game ever. So it still has this incredible cult following.”
So, if you’re keeping track, that means that Ogg ’s most high-profile roles to date — Simon, Trevor and Rebus — have all been fairly nasty. Westworld returns to HBO on April 22 for its second season, as will Ogg ’s brutal character.
“I’m a robot, I can keep getting shot and he keeps coming back,” Ogg says. “For now, I’m still kicking. There’s a great turn with Rebus. I’ve got at least one episode where, I don’t know if I’m prominent, but I’ve got a really fun, exciting turn.”
Still, like most actors, Ogg is always keen to show his range. He did it in a low-budget sci-fi film called Solis, a yet-to-be-released drama about a grieving astronaut trapped in an escape pod that is en route to the sun. He was also recently cast opposite singer and actress Sabrina Carpenter in the indie road drama The Short History of the Long Road, which starts shooting soon in New Mexico. He plays Carpenter’s father.
“I wouldn’t like to think of myself as a one-trick pony,” he says. “Obviously, people enjoy the unpredictable
craziness that I can portray and that’s lovely and fun to do. But if you’re an actor, you want to do different things. Character actors, all those I respect, do so many different things and that’s ideally what one wants to do. That’s why this upcoming project is exciting. It’s not about facial hair. It’s not about craziness. It’s a father who is raising his daughter in a van, in a motorhome. It’s someone who is doing his best to be a father to his only child as they are living in a van. It’s wonderful and it’s beautiful and it’s such a great story.”