The Walking Dead's David Morrissey on His Role as the Governor, Repopulating the World, and Losing His Zombie-Killing Virginity

You've probably noticed that characters on The Walking Dead are dying left and right. On the one hand, that's great—a show about zombies ostensibly has to incorporate zombiefication into the lives of the survivors in a very real way. On the other hand, if we keep losing survivors, we might just end up watching a bunch of undead people walk around saying "UHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" for an hour each Sunday night. Thus, in Season 3, we've seen a handful of new characters arise, most notably the mysterious warrior/zombie dragger Michonne (Danai Gurira) and the Governor, the leader of a refugee camp of sorts called Woodbury.

The Governor is played by British actor David Morrissey. So far, Morrissey's portrayal is already a complex mesh of a man: On one hand, he seems like he really wants to protect his people from zombies. Yet, Michonne is highly suspicious of him, he ruthlessly kills some National Guard soldiers and makes suggestive eyes at Andrea. Is he The Walking Dead's next villain? Or just a misunderstood man, trying to keep sane in a brain-eating world?

···

GQ: Did you audition for the Governor role?
David Morrissey: I was a big fan of the show. I've known Andrew Lincoln [who plays Rick Grimes] for a long time and I thought the pilot was like a movie. I was halfway through the second season and I was in L.A. and my manager said "the casting department from The Walking Dead would like to see you." I was like "wow."

I didn't know the comic book; I'm not a comic book fan, really. As we talked about the role, it was very much this complex person who seemed wonderful to me. You never really knew where you were with him and I liked that idea. Then I read the comic and I was surprised how brutal the Governor was.

GQ: How much are you deviating from the comic character?
David Morrissey: [Creator] Robert Kirkman wrote a book called The Rise of the Governor. The character in that book is a wonderful, complex person. The character that we meet in the comic books is fully formed—his psychotic profile is very much set. The TV version explores the space in between those two stories. That's a very fertile ground for my character, I think.

GQ: After watching the first two episodes you appear in, I'm trying to figure out what makes him villainous. Is he underhanded or just pure evil?
David Morrissey: He's a man who will do whatever it takes to protect his town. He'll do everything to protect his position. He's suddenly in this crazy world and security is everything. When he sees those National Guard guys, there's no way he's going to let soldiers that are combat trained into his place. That's just not going to help his position as a leader at all. He has to maintain his status. That was not a strange decision for me.

What he's done is created a space where mothers and fathers can leave their doors open and their children can run out into the street. That security comes with a price. You see this in our own society: when people are very, very secure, they get complacent. So every now and then, they have to be reminded about what's out there and the danger that's out there.

GQ: I guess he's like Rick in a lot of ways, but with different back stories and histories, so he brings different perspective.
David Morrissey: The real difference between him and Rick is that the Governor has bought himself time. Rick is on his toes—if you can get through the night, you can live tomorrow. With The Governor, he has time to plan, to think about the future. They're starting anew, these people. I don't think he had a position of great power before this event happened to the world; and now he's in this position of power and we all know that can corrupt people sometimes.

GQ: In watching the first episode ("Walk with Me") where you're introduced, there's a lot of mystery around the character. I got this vibe that it could be this cultish society. But it doesn't sound like it is at all.
David Morrissey: Cults suggest people have a choice. There's no choice in the situation the characters are in on the show: you can't choose a cult or go to McDonalds and have a burger. That's not going to happen. There's only two options: Woodbury or out there. That's not a cult. That's an oasis to me. A sanctuary. That's what he's offering.

GQ: I like the idea that science is going on in Woodbury. The Governor seemed very intrigued about how one could control zombies.
David Morrissey: That's nature. That's what man has always done. How can I use this? How can bring this under my power? If you see men working in an environment where there are wild animals, that doesn't stop them from working in there. They develop skills. If they didn't, there would be no change in this world.

This disease, this terrible thing, came from nowhere. In 14th century Europe, when the black plague happened, they built walls around the village to keep people out who they didn't know, because everybody could be carrying the plague. They survived because they locked down their communities. That is what Woodbury is about. I think the Governor is planning on what happens when this thing starts. Who's going to repopulate the world? Tough times needs tough people to make tough decisions and he thinks he's that person.

GQ: Does the Governor get to kill zombies?
David Morrissey: When the helicopter crash happened, you saw those guys turning. And he killed them. That's very important. I consider that my first zombie kill. You never forget your first.  Probably if you're doing Mad Men, you feel like you've arrived with the classic cast when you've lit your first cigarette. And for me, it's when you kill your first zombie.

GQ: How does cleaning off the blood go? Do they provide you with towels?
David Morrissey: I think that's one of the trade secrets that I'm not really aloud to pass on, really. There's a bunch of mutual cleaning that we go through that I would not like to pull out as common knowledge. It's very secretive.

GQ: So you're telling me I cannot apply for a job called "Zombie Blood Cleaner."
David Morrissey: Well, you know it's a bit like a fluffer. You sort of have to have years of experience.

I Totally Recall Having More Fun The First Time

This should tell you everything you need to know about director Len Wiseman's lugubrious new remake of Total Recall, the brutally funny 1990 Paul Verhoeven/Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi classic: Kate Beckinsale, not an actress I often depend on to keep life seeming worthwhile, is the only performer in sight who shows even a glimmer of liveliness or wit. She's playing the part that put the pre-Basic Instinct Sharon Stone on the map—Lori, the loving wife who turns into a kick-ass villainess and slugging opponent once the hero catches on that his "real" life is a sham—and believe me, her maddened Posh Spice glares and curled lip when she revs into action are sights as welcomely incongruous amid the gloom that surrounds her as an icy martini wafting toward you in a mine shaft. It's a mystery how her old-fashioned notion that performances in movies like this one should be amusingly over-the-top ever managed to escape her director's (also her husband's) eagle eye for glumness.

As if to cater to our Great Recession doldrums, the plot has been reworked to drab, literally earthbound (no trip to Mars) effect. But the basic gimmick is in place. Taking over Ah-nold's old role, Colin Farrell plays Doug Quaid, an assembly-line worker living in "The Colony"—that is, the former Australia, now packed with mostly Asian refugees after too much chemical warfare has turned it into one of the only two habitable places on the planet. The other and richer one is the "United Federation of Britain," to which drone bees like Doug commute via a sort of supersized Acela named "The Fall"—not after the band, presumably—which zaps them through the earth's core in seventeen minutes flat.
The UFB's top cat is Bryan Cranston as the usual sinister dork with a totalitarian gleam in his eye, named Cohaagen-Dazs or something. (OK, so it's just "Cohaagen," but finding laughs in this movie is a DIY project.) He's got plans to invade the Colony with a robot army of heavily armed "synthetic police" to root out the resistance movement there. If all of this sounds like pretty stale stuff as dystopias go, you're getting the drift. The way the Colony is visualized mostly just tells you how badly Wiseman would rather be remaking Blade Runner.
Troubled by recurring dreams in which he's some sort of secret agent, Doug drops into Rekall—purveyors of implanted fake memories—and asks for their spy package. (The original's set-up was less clumsy: Schwarzenegger wanted to visit a virtual Mars simply because he couldn't afford to go to the real one.) And, well, you know what's coming: It turns out his spy fantasy was the reality, and his former employers up top wiped his brain clean of remembering it. Now he's a turncoat on the run, helped out by a resistance fighter named Melina (Jessica Biel). She needs to take him to her/their leader, Matthias—played by a mightily bored Bill Nighy, who seems to be fighting an impulse to yank out an iPhone between yawns and ask Siri to find him a new agent—to help foil Cohaagen-Dazs's looming invasion.
Understand, in principle, there's no particular reason to lament the idea of remaking Total Recall (which was itself based on Philip K. Dick's story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"). The original is 22 years old, pretty much the Pleistocene era to today's public, and not what you'd call sacred. But as tiresome as it is to say, just about every choice made by the filmmakers ends up reminding you of how much more brash and inventive Verhoeven's original was. Even the reprise of one of the 1990 version's best-remembered gotchas—a mutant prostitute exhibiting her three breasts—is embarrassing, because she's just plunked into a scene at random and nothing else in the movie justifies including her. For Verhoeven, three-breasted hookers were an organic (so to speak) part of the gleeful, salaciously pranksterish tone he brought to the material.
Compared to Verhoeven's relish for tweaking us with perverse gags and bold images—not least, the big post-marital martial-arts brawl between Schwarzenegger and Stone, a cliché now but a genuinely twisted novelty in those pre-Buffy the Vampire Slayer days—the way the new movie crawls by feels like sitting through a state funeral for a bunch of gigantic kitchen appliances. The variety and flair of the original's action showpieces have been replaced by scene after scene of people monotonously punching each other in cramped, dim surroundings, and even the one sequence that might have generated some thrill-ride momentum—a chase involving futuristic cars scooting around above ground—is a cluttered mess. The same goes for the CGI renditions of the world everybody lives in; they're so crammed with post-apocalyptic busywork that you can't glean any basic information about each environment, like where anything is in relation to anything else or the intended result of what anybody is trying to do.
The real puzzler, though, is that the whole thing is so joyless. How badly do you have to blow redoing Total Recall to end up with a movie that's no fun at all? Practically the only joke in the whole two hours is whose face is on the future's currency—and it goes by in an unexplained eyeblink, too. Beckinsale aside, nobody in the cast has any spark. Farrell seems to have been directed to play the hero by imagining what Robert Downey, Jr., might be like after a lobotomy. (Answer: awfully down in the dumps.) Cranston—who's so brilliant in Breaking Bad—seems almost painfully out of place; it's like watching Hal Holbrook play Hitler as he tries to stick in little touches of folksiness to humanize him.
Then again, Wiseman may not have blown it at all so far as the big audience is concerned. Joylessness—or humorlessness, anyhow—is what proves a comic-book movie's importance these days. Even admiring The Dark Knight Rises as I mostly do, I can still wish Christopher Nolan hadn't become the exemplar for everybody else, especially filmmakers who can't match either his visual authority or his intimations of depth. If the new Total Recall ends up certifying the vogue, people like me may soon take to looking forward to the next Lars von Trier flick to perk ourselves up with a reminder that life has a larky side.

Blazing Saddles: Tom Carson on Luck

With none other than Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte heading the cast—and both doing some of their canniest work ever—the acting's the top reason to check out Luck, HBO's latest contender for Major American TV Drama. But the best reason to stick with it is that David (Deadwood) Milch and Michael (Miami Vice) Mann's bid to turn playing the horses into a pressure-cooker version of life in these United States just keeps getting more engrossing, even for viewers who don't know a trifecta from a daily double.

Hoffman is Chester "Ace" Bernstein, a wily moneybags who's just out after three years in the pen and wants a piece of California's Santa Anita racetrack. That dapper rock Dennis Farina plays his longtime chauffeur and live-in confidant, a relationship as vital to both of these tough cookies as J. Edgar Hoover's bromance with Clyde Tolson. But Ace's maneuvers are only one squiggle in a Jackson Pollock canvas of jockeys, trainers, agents, gamblers, and hangers-on all living for the adrenaline rush of post time. Though Nolte, as an old-school owner, obviously jumps right out—and so does Richard Kind as a stammering jockeys' rep—keep your eyes peeled for the quartet of funkily inspired performers (Kevin Dunn, token pretty boy Jason Gedrick, manic Ritchie Coster, and beatific Ian Hart) playing clubhouse pond scum turned neophyte horse owners after a big Pick 6 score. Half comic relief and half Greek chorus, they could be the funniest bunch of monomaniacs since The X-Files introduced the Lone Gunmen.

In a satisfyingly democratic way, what gives even these skeevy dudes equal rights with millionaires in Luck's milieu is a shared passion—if not addiction, or maybe religion—that trumps family attachments and everything else. The races themselves are shot and scored in a hyperbolic style totally unlike the rest of the show's unromantic tone, dramatizing their charged meaning to aficionados. Not just high-stakes contests, they're also the only transfiguring experiences this otherwise cynical world has to offer. Even Ace succumbs when he acquires a Mister Ed of his own: His look of quizzical wonder in the stalls tells you he's forming the first unguarded bond of his gnarly life. The ultra-American beauty of Luck is that pretty much everyone in sight is mercenary and calculating—and yet, whether they know it or not, they're in it for the poetry.