Jeffrey Dean Morgan still finding nuance in 'Dead City' character Negan

NEW YORK, May 4 (UPI) -- Jeffrey Dean Morgan says he never gets tired of playing Negan because the Walking Dead antagonist is always growing and adapting to new situations.

"After all the years of playing one character, it's the amount of growth that I think that Negan's had and the different sides of Negan that we've been able to show [that are satisfying]," Morgan, 59, said at a recent New York Comic Con press conference.

"I hope that I grow as a human being, as well, but in different ways than probably Negan," he joked. "It has been interesting to track him from when he first came out of that trailer in the clearing to where he is this season. There's been a lot of a roller coaster ride for Negan and I think it really is kind of coming to a head this year."

Negan was introduced as a barbed-wire-covered-baseball-bat-carrying villain in Season 6 of The Walking Dead.

Negan was quickly captured, imprisoned and, up until the zombie-apocalypse drama's 11th and final season, sought redemption for killing Glenn (Steven Yeun), the beloved husband of Maggie (Lauren Cohan), who was pregnant with their only child Hershel.

The Walking Dead spinoff, Dead City, shows Maggie and Negan teaming up for an unlikely mission in the Big Apple to rescue the now teen-age Hershel (Logan Kim) from the clutches of a power-hungry mad man known as the Croat (Zelijko Ivanek), who just happens to idolize Negan.

Season 2 premieres Sunday on AMC.

"Some stuff that we've never seen Negan do, we will see this year, some stuff that I think will shock people " Morgan teased.

"Yet, there's always that old Negan that is still in there, which is really interesting and fun. He doesn't lose track -- ever -- of who he is and where he came from."

Negan and Maggie -- who know each other longer and better than any other characters in Dead City -- are still trying to figure out how to co-exist with one another in Season 2.

"There's a lot of stuff to fill in, I think, with Maggie and Negan. Because of the last eight years -- in show years it's even more than that -- obviously, there's a relationship that's established that the audience all know about," Morgan noted.

"So, I think we go into scenes and it's like, 'How can we turn this in a way that not only makes it something different for the audience [but also for us]?'" he added. "It's about trying to find that new peg and I think, as time goes and this relationship continues, does that add a comfort or does it add more strain?"

Morgan said he loves working with Cohan no matter how much their characters appear to hate each other on screen.

"We have fun," he emphasized. "We always have a good time working together, regardless of how harsh or how difficult it may be."

The actor didn't want to give too much away about Season 2's plot details.

"We're not allowed to really say anything in these things, which is always very fun, makes it great to do a press conference," he quipped.

"But I think we had a really fun year, as far as doing new stuff with the two characters," he added. "There's a lot of history."

Writer-producer Scott M. Gimple summed the season up at a separate NYCC fan panel.

"It takes everything that you loved about Season 1 and it just cranks it up," Gimple told the crowd.

"There's more discovery. There's more characters. There's more intensity between [Negan and Maggie]. We see corners that we've never thought of in New York City and I think that the amount of just scope that we achieved here was unbelievable."