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?

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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.

Zombies, as American as Apple Pie

The day I get fed up with zombies will be the day I become one, and I know I'm not alone. Sinatra's voice, the electoral college, random squads of flesh-munching post-humans with Heinz 57 facial makeovers—these are the indigenous relics we all know will endure until Alpha Centauri scientists get busy sorting out our idea of fun. We're in hock to Europe for vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein's monster, but sorry, world: Shaun of the Dead or no Shaun of the Dead, we own this turf. Ravenous dorks in bloodstained Dockers and cheerleader togs are as American as Adam's-apple pie.


Partly because there's no way to make 'em elegant—sooner or later, even the most stylish director has to either show them chowing down or be accused of cheating—the planet's most democratic monsters never used to get much respect. The latest cycle of the zombie meme also got pretty cutesy for a while, from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Woody Harrelson and the pre-Social Network Jesse Eisenberg bashing in pumpkin-head skulls for laughs in 2009's very funny, far from dumb Zombieland. But then AMC's The Walking Dead came along, and whammo: America's ultimate conspicuous consumers were back in all their foul, decaying glory. The reason zombies can't jump the shark is that they are the shark, baby. Now they've finally gotten the epic TV showcase they deserve.

Based on Robert Kirkman's graphic-novel series, The Walking Dead—whose six-episode debut season is due out on DVD March 8, and hosanna—stars Andrew Lincoln as small-town-Georgia sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes, who awakens from a Rip van Mayberry coma after a shoot-out with a random perp puts him in the hospital. That's when he discovers the world he once knew has turned into a gory-jawed John McCain look-alike contest overnight.

Since he doesn't want "I Ate the Sheriff" to end up getting played at his funeral, he sets out for a failed panacea: Atlanta, which turns out to be overrun with lurching ghoulies. Once he's gotten out of that one and located the rest of the cast, his next try is a CDC complex whose sole remaining factotum ends up making the joint go kablooey in a fit of suicidal despair.

What Rick doesn't know is that his wife, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), and former partner, Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal), got into making each other's bacon sizzle back when they thought he was history. Naturally, along with Rick and Lori's son, they're both part of the ragtag Grimes-led caravan we last saw road-to-nowhere-ing it across a smoke-plumed wasteland in the season finale. And yep—as Huck Finn used to say, we've been here before. Does anything top that primal American fantasy of an improvised community on the move in search of an elusive promised land?

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If you're still in any doubt that zombies graduated long ago from one-joke creeps to all-purpose metaphors, The Walking Dead will cure you in a jiffy. Vampire snobs can call the basic concept rudimentary all they like. A big plus for Team Living Dead is that, what with the poor personal hygiene and worse social skills, zombies are hard to get romantic about—preventing millions of teenage girls from ruining everything for the rest of us by fantasizing how dreamy it might be to date one. Never stop being thankful that the zombie equivalent of Twilight would be Dinnertime.

And to think we owe it all to what used to be called the best movie ever made in Pittsburgh. It's not like director George A. Romero made everything up from scratch in the original Night of the Living Dead. Revived corpses had already featured in all sorts of creepy tales, from voodoo myths to Russian literary titan Nikolai Gogol's scary 1835 story "Viy." But pretty amazingly, the basics of zombiedom as we know it today—the shambling walk, the appetite for human flesh—were improvised for a single shoestring-budget indie flick in 1968. If we're talking cultural ubiquity as opposed to artistic impact, NotLD has a fair claim to being the most influential movie of all time.

Social satire came front and center with Romero's shopping-mall-set Dawn of the Dead a decade later. It's never been MIA since. What's unique about zombies as horror figures is that—partly because they used to be just like us and still dress the part, and partly because they're so stupid—they're intrinsically funny. While a comic vampire movie is a spoof, a zombie flick without any laughs usually just isn't doing its job.

What makes them a great American joke is that the joke can be on us without quite being about us, or maybe it's the other way around. If vampires are a fantasy of elitism—a riff on decadent old-world aristocracy—then zombies, in their "We the Ex-People" way, are the sickest possible parody of Jefferson-style egalitarianism. They give us permission to add a fun coda to "Pogo" cartoonist Walt Kelly's best-known quip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us. Now hand me a baseball bat."

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"Permission" is the right word, too. Unlike sci-fi's doomsday scenarios, zombie movies are mainly fantasies of wholesale social breakdown. That's their attraction, not just their scare machinery. Never underestimate the galvanizing effect on any healthy American male of an anarchic U.S.A. in which our lumbering, drooling former co-citizens can be blasted like skeet.

Coming in a close second is the turn-on of material goods suddenly free for the taking, something The Walking Dead poeticized when Grimes the lawman—gently saying, "I don't think those rules apply anymore"—let a fellow refugee (Laurie Holden) swipe a mermaid necklace from a department store. With Hummers, weaponry, and whole supermarkets up for grabs, the pilfering scenes in a zombie movie are capitalism porn that outdoes any shopping-spree montage in a chick flick. And since we also kind of hate all the pointless crapola consumer culture nags us to buy, Zombieland was at its shrewdest when the heroes trashed an inoffensive tourist-trap souvenir shop as gleefully as if its trinket-crammed notion of charm had been oppressing them for years.

At the same time, downright touchingly, zombie movies have also become the garage-sale repository for fables about our hardy national spirit. The irresistibility of World War Z, Max Brooks's best-selling "oral history" of a future zombie war, was all in his resurrection of the kind of heroic America—with everybody in the new Greatest Generation selflessly doing his or her part for victory—that these days seems more chimerical than ever.

At its most involving, The Walking Dead pulls together these resonances and undertones more consciously than any zombie saga before it. It's not just that Grimes, who pointedly still wears his old-timey sheriff's hat, rode into town on horseback in the premiere, or that his cuckolding second banana probably isn't named Shane by accident. As the caravan's Wise Old Coot, Jeffrey DeMunn is patently the postmillennial version of Walter Brennan manning the chuck wagon on Red River's cattle drive—and with a brainy Asian-American dude (Steven Yeun) and a stalwart African-American one (IronE Singleton), among others, aboard for the ride, the series has one foot planted in the melting pot and the other in The Road Warrior.

Thanks to the Georgia setting, a whole other set of associations is in play as well. Civil War buffs who got a jolt from a character recalling "when Atlanta fell" no doubt also recognized the likely source of Rick Grimes's stunned walk past body-bagged corpses as he left the hospital: Scarlett's trek among the railroad-station casualties in Gone with the Wind, hands down the most moving crowd shot of all time. All that was missing was the Stars and Bars mournfully flapping away as the camera pulled back and the orchestra broke into "Dixie."

Before you get all p.c. about the implications of equating modern-day America with ye olde Confederacy, remember that context makes a difference. Because a pang of involuntary identification isn't quite the same thing as an endorsement, what registers isn't "They were wrong"; what registers—and haunts us—is "They lost." We also know that all those dead relatives and neighbors aren't coming back, at least once a head shot has disposed of their posthumous incarnation. Even if it ends up having a happy or "happy" ending, The Walking Dead, like the best of Romero, allegorizes an inconvenient truth that most of our chipper culture hasn't given up on sugarcoating: The world that was can never be restored.