'The Walking Dead' Postmortem: Lennie James on Morgan's Backstory and What's Ahead

Warning: Storyline and character spoilers ahead for the “Here’s Not Here” episode of The Walking Dead.

Was “Here’s Not Here,” aka The Morgan Backstory Episode of The Walking Dead, everything you hoped/expected/wanted it to be? Viewers had been waiting to find out what had turned the unhinged man of “Clear” into the peace-minded, bo staff-wielding man who’d tracked down his friend Rick Grimes, and “Here’s Not Here” broke it all down, including just how low Morgan had fallen before meeting his friend Eastman and what motivated him to make his way to the railroad tracks that led to Terminus and, eventually, his Alexandria reunion with Rick.

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Lennie James — Emmy-worthy actor Lennie James — chatted with Yahoo TV about this much-anticipated episode, including his praise for the “proper-sized geezer” who was such a part of Morgan’s story, who Morgan was addressing in those meltdown moments of raging to invisible people, the biggest turning points for Morgan, and whether or not the influence of his friend Eastman will be enough to keep him rooted in his no-killing philosophy, especially now that he’s got the big bad Wolf gang member locked up in Alexandria.

Was there anything about Morgan’s backstory that surprised you?
I think his whole relationship with Eastman was a surprise to me. Because that character could be anything, really. I think the kind of gentleness that comes packaged in John Carroll Lynch, who’s a big man … he’s easily 6-foot-5. He’s a proper-sized geezer, as we say back in London. But he has a real gentleness, and I think the way he coaxes Morgan back to a sense of himself is beautifully done. That relationship is Morgan’s salvation, as it were, or certainly Morgan being pulled out of the rabbit hole … that it happened in such a relationship kind of surprised me. It was the one part of the journey that I wasn’t expecting, but it worked fantastically.

One of the most surprising things for me was that, because we hadn’t seen Morgan at a lot of different points, we never got a full sense of just how dejected and violent and aggressive he had become. That’s sort of jolting when we first experience it in this episode.
Yes, I remember when [showrunner] Scott [Gimple] said, before I’d actually read the episode and we were just talking about it, he said, “We’re taking Morgan a little further into the dark before we start walking him back to the light.” I was like, how can we take him any further into the dark? But Scott being Scott, they managed to come out with a way of absolutely doing it.

In all honestly, despite what Morgan’s journey’s been and the dark places that he has inhabited, especially in Season 3, in “Clear,” I’ve always, and still do, love playing him. I like getting into his head. I like figuring out how Morgan sees the world. He’s a character I’m very fond of and a character that I’m very protective of. In a weird way, the hardest part of playing him so far was not the first time I did “Clear,” but in [this episode], going back to his mindset in “Clear.” That was the hardest part of the journey, getting back into that dark place, and then going a little bit darker. It was the trickiest part of the journey, but it was one that I relished, as I do with playing the guy.

When Morgan is back in that place, in that apartment where we saw him in “Clear” — and he does it again later at the woodsy site — who is he yelling at? Is he yelling at himself? Is he addressing himself at that point?
Yes and no. I think at a point, he’s talking to his son. I think he’s talking to all the ghosts that inhabit him, that follow him. So at some point, he’s talking to his son, and at other points, he’s talking to his wife. At other points, he’s talking to people he’s met along the way.

I think one of the things that’s really important, just because it was one of the things I got from when I was trying to research people who are in that kind of traumatic stage, is even if Morgan is talking to himself, he’s not talking to himself as if he’s the only person in the room. He’s talking to himself as if he is there, and another version of himself is there. As far as he’s concerned, he’s talking to somebody; it’s just that the person isn’t there, and he isn’t aware of the fact that they aren’t there. He’s not just screaming into the wind. When he’s talking to his son, his son is there as far as he’s concerned. When he’s talking to his wife, his wife is there as far as he’s concerned. Equally, when he’s talking to himself, there is a ‘himself’ there as well, who he sees and is talking to.

One of the saddest things we come to realize about him is that his sole purpose in life has become to “clear,” to kill everything that moves around him.
It’s absolutely true. In this episode, there are two big transitional moments for Morgan, I think. There is the moment after Eastman has told him that the cell door isn’t locked, that he can open it on his own. He opens it and attacks Eastman. Then at the end of that sequence, Eastman offers him a choice, that he could leave, or that he could stay and Eastman will help him. Morgan chooses the third option, which is to go back into the cell and to close the cell door on his own. For me, that’s Morgan’s rock bottom. That’s the bit where he doesn’t even think he’s worth having any options anymore.

I think his first step back to redemption … when he comes across the young couple in the woods, and he kills the walker who’s about to land on top of them. Then the woman of the couple puts the bullet on the can. Morgan lets them walk away. Those two people were the first people, walkers or breathers, that Morgan let walk away without at least trying to kill them or absolutely killing them. That moment is his first step back to some kind of redemption. It’s his first step on the road of believing that all life is precious.

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What do you think kept him motivated during that time before he met Eastman? We know that his purpose as he saw it was to continue clearing. When he meets Eastman, he asks Eastman to kill him. He could have killed himself, or he could have allowed himself to be caught by walkers, but didn’t.
It’s a weird thing, really, and it’s one of the things I think was very brave from Scott and from AMC and the creators and producers of The Walking Dead, which was to name the trauma that Morgan is going through as PTSD. To a greater or lesser extent, most of the characters in this show will have some kind of familiarity with it. In fact, there’s something within the human spirit, even though you’re suffering and all of those kinds of things, it’s like you become the dice man. You just throw the dice. If it’s a six, you’ll walk across the road without looking. If it’s a three, you’ll go into the store and buy a beer. That’s kind of where Morgan’s at.

His trauma … most people with PTSD don’t kill themselves. Most of them try and find a way of hanging onto life, however unbearable that life seems to be. I think that what Morgan is doing is … “I’m gonna keep walking in this direction. This direction is a direction where I kill everything that’s in my path. At some point, I’ll come up against something that will kill me. That will be my way out of the nightmare.” That’s the option that Morgan has taken. He’s gonna keep clearing until somebody clears him. When Eastman puts him on the floor and Morgan looks up and goes, “Kill me,” it’s a plea, saying, “Are you the end of my road? Because if you are at the end of my road, let’s get it done.” That’s what he’s doing.

And he is at the end of that particular road, at that point.
Hopefully he is. When Eastman gets bitten, you get a sense of how quickly Morgan can slip back into the “Clear” version of himself, once he loses something that is close to him. Once he realizes just how much Eastman has grown to mean to him, the idea that he was about to lose him kind of crushed him and sent him back in the opposite direction.

So at the end of “Here’s Not Here,” we see Morgan has been telling this story to the Wolf, who a lot of viewers thought he had killed earlier. Now we know he hasn’t. Is Morgan trying to be Eastman to the Wolf?
He is trying to do for the Wolf what Eastman did for him. You’ll just have to keep watching to see how successful he is. I will underline one thing about Morgan’s version of it, as opposed to Eastman’s version of it. Eastman did it pretty much in isolation. There was no one else around. There were only two people for miles and miles and miles. So it was possible to leave the cell door open. Morgan is doing this inside the walls of Alexandria, where he’s learning to take onboard the safety of others. That’s partly why, at the end of the episode, he doesn’t do what Eastman did, which was to leave the cell door unlocked.

The Wolf seemed affected by the story that Morgan shared with him. Yet at the same time, he promises he’s going to be the Crighton Dallas Wilton in Morgan’s life, killing everyone, even the children. How does that shake Morgan’s resolve to this new way of thinking?
Well, it’s certainly going to test his resolve. What the outcome of that test will be, we’ll have to wait and find out. Just as it was between Eastman and Morgan, this is not going to be an easy road for either of them to walk down. We’ll have to see whether or not the different environments in which it’s happening has any kind of fundamental effect on the outcome.

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During a Season 6 preview episode of Talking Dead, you said you’ve gotten so into practicing with the bo staff, the aikido, that you found yourself even at the grocery store thinking about it. Is it still having that much of an effect on you?
It does, particularly if I’ve had a day on set where the bo staff has been in my hands all day. And it’s not that I walk around thinking, “How am I going to beat people over the head with a piece of wood?” What it is is, every now and then, I find if I’m walking in one direction and there’s lots of people walking in the other direction, since I’ve been spending quite a lot of time swinging the stick, there are moments when I walk through people thinking, “I can take your ankles there. Take the neck there. Come down on the head there,” and then I’d be on the other side, and I can kind of go about my business and get my pint of milk. So that still happens. Less and less now. I try to consciously push those thoughts away.

Does it give you a certain amount of confidence though, just to have those skills?
I wouldn’t ever want to put those skills into practice in the real world. But yes, there is a sense … I can feel it in myself now. I can swing the stick and twiddle it between my fingers and do set moves. I don’t think I’ve quite gotten to the point where I could properly spar, but I’m getting there. I have a catalog of moves now both to protect and attack. I think I could hold my own at a very basic level. I think I could do enough to extradite myself from some situation where somebody wasn’t pointing a more potent weapon at me.

Before the season began, you said we should always keep in mind that, whatever we’re thinking about Morgan at any given time, he’s still just on part of his journey. We shouldn’t conclude that this is where he is permanently now, and that is evident at the end of the episode with his interactions with the Wolf. What can you say about his journey so far, and where he’s going? Are you satisfied for the character that this what’s happened for him so far?
I’m interested very much in Morgan’s position and his dilemmas. That’s always been the thing that I’m most interested in with playing the guy. What I will say about him is that Morgan is not Eastman at this particular moment in time. Morgan could not say aloud and mean it that he is at peace with himself because all life is precious, and he has decided not to kill anymore. I don’t think he’s gotten there at all. I think he’s trying, and I think that his trials and tribulations in order to get to a point where he can say that is going to be very much the story of Season 6 for Morgan.

And yes, I am having a lot of fun navigating a man with Morgan’s experience of this world, seeing how he can co-exist, not just with Rick and the group, but with the Alexandrians … who he may turn out to be. Whether or not he’s actually capable of living amongst them. Those things really excite me about Morgan.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.