“The worst fucking decision”: the 2003 role that made Jeffrey Dean Morgan want to quit acting
There’s something slightly unnerving about an actor who can just as easily play the role of someone so ill that they’re about to be dead as someone who is very adept at dispatching people so that they’re actually dead, but that’s the case when you consider Jeffrey Dean Morgan and two of his more famous parts in Grey’s Anatomy and The Walking Dead.
Obviously, there’s a big difference between lying in a hospital bed being sad while people bring you Lucozade and grapes, and rampaging around, wielding a baseball bat wrapped in razor wire, smashing skulls, so perhaps it’s not a surprise that it was his role in the latter, a sprawling post-apocalyptic zombie hit that spawned countless spin-offs that has become Morgan’s calling card in recent years.
It was all the way back in 2005 that Morgan played the patient in need of a heart transplant, Denny Duquette, in a storyline that attracted the attention of millions of viewers in the US, but that was the culmination of almost fifteen years of work for the Seattle-born actor, including taking on acting jobs that very nearly drove him to the point of packing it in altogether.
A few years back he appeared on the viral ‘shove spicy chicken in your face and try not to cry’ series Hot Ones, and when reminded by host Sean Evans about the role he once described as ‘the job that made me want to quit acting’ as a heavily made-up ‘Xindi-Reptilian’ in Star Trek: Enterprise back in 2003, Morgan said, “That quote was on the nose. That job was on the nose. In a bad way. It turns out I’m claustrophobic. I had a really hard time doing the makeup process, and I had straws in my nose.
Adding, “I’ve never been on a set where I went home at night and just thought, ‘What am I doing? This is… I’ve made the worst fucking decision of my life. I don’t ever want to be an actor again.’ Like, I was sure that this was just wrong, and it almost made me quit. It was horrible.”
Luckily, Morgan only had to cope with the prosthetics for a single episode before going on to land guest spots in shows like The OC and Weeds before his breakthrough in Grey’s. After that, his profile increased to some extent, but despite making a film a year up until 2014, it was his pretty terrifying portrayal of Negan in AMC’s The Walking Dead that changed everything for him. It also led to his own spin-off show, The Walking Dead: Dead City, in which he has the joint lead with Lauren Cohen; a third season has been announced, which should air later this year.
Morgan also has a major role in The Boys, another comic book series that is in its final season on Prime Video and has proved to be another pivotal part for Morgan as Joe Kessler, a CIA Case Officer who appears as a recurring hallucination of Billy Butcher, played by fellow muscle-bound bearded dude Karl Urban.
Meanwhile, Morgan will soon start filming on a movie called The Postcard Thriller, co-starring former Bond femme fatale Famke Janssen, about a detective trying to find his wife somewhere in Europe with only a series of cryptic postcards for clues.
