With the start of production on the eleventh season of AMC's The Walking Dead delayed due to the pandemic, the network has decided to greenlight six "bonus episodes" of the show that will air in the spring of 2021, right in between the season 10 finale (which aired last month) and the season 11 premiere (likely to air next fall).
The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang has said these bonus episodes
are all designed to be filmed safely during this pandemic that we're in. There's sort of an anthological feel to some of them. They're really deep dives into our characters, which I hope people enjoy. We've been enjoying working on something that's a little bit different from what we were doing in the main part of Season 10. We just get to feature different people and tell these little stories that all kind of add up to a picture of what our survivors are going through, and that will lead us into Season 11 eventually."
It sounds like one of those character deep dive episodes is going to focus on the formerly villainous character Negan (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan), since ComicBook.com has learned that Morgan's real life wife Hilarie Burton will be appearing in an episode as Negan's late wife Lucille. In the comic book source material,
Negan was married to a woman named Lucille prior to the end of the world. In the final days of the normal world, Lucille was battling cancer. The marriage was not traditional, as Negan had been having an affair which his wife was aware of prior to her diagnosis. Following the diagnosis, Negan wanted to spend as much time with his wife as possible, ultimately calling his affair off and dedicating all of his time to Lucille. When Lucille passed away, the moment of death came nearly simultaneously to the world falling and the zombie virus beginning to spread. Lucille reanimated as a walker in her hospital bed. As the story goes, Negan named a baseball bat which he used to protect himself and others after his late wife.
Negan's back story was told in Here's Negan, a standalone volume of the Walking Dead comic book. You can pick up a copy HERE. Making one of these bonus episodes at least partially an adaptation of Here's Negan makes sense, as this is the best opportunity to get the story out there.
A former MTV VJ, Burton's has over thirty acting roles to her name. Her credits include the horror film SOLSTICE, 130 episodes of One Tree Hill, 25 episodes of White Collar, 6 episodes of both Extant and Lethal Weapon, and a bunch of TV movies set around Christmas. It was an obvious choice to have her play Negan's wife, but it's also cool that she'll be able to be on The Walking Dead alongside her husband.
Been pretty hard to keep this a secret. ????
But I love working with @JDMorgan . I love watching him become #Negan and take on that swagger. And I love the @TheWalkingDead family. They’ve been a part of our family for ages and I’m so grateful for their kindness. Xoxo #hereslucille https://t.co/9tRh7NB8WY— Hilarie Burton Morgan (@HilarieBurton) November 3, 2020
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