Permanent, and actors often live in fear

dies,” he says. “You get a call from (showrunner) Scott Gimple and he’ll say, ‘I don’t know if you know, but...’

“Sometimes you do know, because you talked to the actor and he or she had been told. Or sometimes that’s what happened in the comic book. But sometimes it isn’t. So we’re usually as surprised as anyone.”

James admits he’s personally happy the TV show doesn’t always follow the blueprint of the comic books on which it’s based.

“I can’t tell what’s happening with Morgan from the comic book,” he laughs, “because in the comic, Morgan is no longer alive.”

While Morgan appeared in the pilot for “The Walking Dead,” he then largely vanished for several seasons. He returned in the much-praised Season 3 episode “Clear,” and by Season 6 he was a regular sharing the general astonishment at what an institution the show had become. “No one had any idea this would happen,” says James. “What we heard in the beginning was that the show couldn’t work because everything then was about vampires and we were about zombies.” Morgan himself will undertake a pioneering journey this season, becoming the first character to cross over from “The Walking Dead” to its spinoff, “Fear the Walking Dead.”

The fourth season of “Fear” launches on AMC on April 15, after the Season 8 finale of “TWD,” and James admits, “I had to be convinced” that this transition “was the right thing for me as an actor and for my family.”

Once he was, he says, “I was excited about the possibilities.”

In keeping with company policy, James says nothing about what viewers will see from Morgan, or anyone else, on either show.

He does, however, say what not to expect of Morgan, who for a long time was so averse to lethal violence that he carried his stick, not a gun.

“I would like to make a request that people stop calling Morgan a moral compass,” James declares in an almost Shakespearean tone. “Because everyone who has been called that has ended up dead.

“And I’m not ready to go.”