Morgan goes to bat
Walking Dead character helped form his personality in monster flick
When Jeffrey Dean Morgan first saw himself on screen as Agent Russell in the mega-budgeted monster film, Rampage, he noticed an uninvited guest creeping into his performance from time to time.
It was Negan, the ruthless and verbose chief antagonist he plays on the AMC juggernaut The Walking Dead, who has become one of the most divisive, talked-about and intriguing characters on television in the past two years.
“There’s also some similarities to Negan, but I was also shooting this movie the same time I was doing the show, so I think there was a little bit of slop-over effect,” says Morgan, in an interview with Postmedia on the day after the red carpet première of Rampage in Hollywood. “I was watching the movie last night and I’m like ‘Oh, that looked like a little bit of a Negan thing I had there.’ Doing both at the same time, it was a little hard to differentiate on days I was tired I’m sure.”
Morgan insists it wasn’t intentional. But it is quite effective, a winking nod to the audience that keeps us unsettled about the mysterious Agent Russell. Just who is this guy? What are his allegiances? What are his intentions?
“I don’t know what to say in interviews, either,” says Morgan. “I think he’s very much a red herring and you’re not supposed to know as an audience which way this character is going to go. I think (director Brad Peyton) did a good job telling the story. And I’ve heard a lot in the interviews that I’ve done that people are interested in finding out more about Agent Russell and where he comes from and who he is. That’s always a good thing to hear, I suppose. If you make a movie and people want to know more about your character, you’ve done OK.”
Still, for now, Morgan says there are four stars of Rampage: the gigantic silverback gorilla, grey wolf and American crocodile that mutate to monstrous proportions and wreak havoc on Chicago, and gigantic action star Dwayne Johnson, who plays an anti-poaching primatologist named Davis Okoye. The muscle-bound Okoye is pals with George (played through motion-capture by Jason Miles), the loyal silverback gorilla who communicates through sign language before being infected with some sort of nefarious gene-altering substance that mutates him into a massive and massively pissedoff menace. Okoye and geneticist Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) go rogue to try and figure out a way to save America’s cities and George at the same time.
Russell enters the scene early in the mayhem as a member of a mysterious government agency.
Like Negan, he seems to be in love with his own voice. He gets to say things like: “When science s--ts the bed, I’m the guy they call to change the sheets” and occasionally starts sentences with “As my old grand-pappy used to say ...”
“In reading the script, I thought the role was the coolest role in the movie,” Morgan says.
Rampage was based on the 1980s Midway arcade game of the same name, which allowed players to destroy cities as George, Lizzie (the crocodile) and Ralph (the wolf ). Since the film is so dependent on CGI and post-production techniques, he and the other actors often had to perform to invisible co-stars, requiring much childlike imagination.
“You have to really find something that makes you react in a way that is comparable to a 40-foot gorilla throwing something at you,” he says. “So you’re putting on your acting shoes, I guess. But making a movie like this is like being a kid again. So it’s finding your inner child ...”
But before he began killing off fan favourites with his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat in The Walking Dead, the actor didn’t seem to have many issues with typecasting. He played everything from tragic heart-transplant patient Denny Duquette in Grey’s Anatomy, to a dreamily sensitive P.I. in the political drama The Good Wife, to Sam and Dean’s tormented father in the CW’s Supernatural. He even played Joe DiMaggio in the miniseries The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe.
But Morgan acknowledges that the shadow of Negan is likely to follow him for quite some time.
“It is something I’m finding out as the days go on that I would like to get away from Negan,” he says.