Jeffrey Dean Morgan — and fans — were in for a surprise when his wife, Hilarie Burton Morgan, returned to The Walking Dead: Dead City.
During the Sunday, June 15, episode of the hit AMC show, Negan (Morgan) hallucinated his dead wife, Lucille (Burton Morgan), while trying to help a sick Ginny (Mahina Anne Marie Napoleon). He spent the episode reflecting on his past struggles — including his attempts to keep Lucille alive after a cancer diagnosis before she died by suicide.
Negan finally confronted the vision of his deceased wife after she initially appeared to be a thief. Negan apologized for failing to keep Lucille alive, but she disagreed with him.
“You got me up every morning. You washed me,” she told Negan, who said “it wasn’t enough.” The hallucination of Lucille continued, “You got me dressed. You undressed me.”
Burton Morgan, 42, originally appeared as Lucille in the season 10 finale of The Walking Dead. Viewers learned through flashbacks that it was Negan’s wife who inspired the name of his murder bat.
“We’ve been trying to figure out a way to bring her back into the show since she came on the first time,” Morgan, 59, told People. “I always wanted her back.”
Morgan was thrilled about how the moment will push his character forward, adding, “[Showrunner] Eli [Jorné] figured out a way to bring her back, and we did. I think that it does so much for my character having her around so you can see behind the door of why Negan is Negan.”
The couple have been together off screen since 2009, getting married in October 2019 after welcoming son Gus, 14, and daughter George, 5.
“Jeffrey and I weren’t made for dating. He was the man I was gonna get old and boring with. Instead of late nights out at clubs or wining and dining, at night we’d settle in and watch an episode of Lonesome Dove,” Burton Morgan reflected in her 2020 memoir, The Rural Diaries. “We decided that when we had a kid, we’d name him Gus after Robert DuVall’s character. As the credits rolled, Jeffrey turned to me and asked, ‘Do you just want to do this? Do you want to try and have a family?’ We’d known each other less than a month.”
Burton Morgan has previously opened up about how navigating fertility struggles after welcoming Gus impacted their relationship.
“I did have postpartum [depression] with my son. I didn’t know I did because I was in the fog of it, but I wasn’t fun to be around, and I was severely depressed after I had my first miscarriage,” Burton Morgan exclusively told Us Weekly in May 2020. “I can look at it now and see how self-destructive I was. … Until you go through that first really horrible thing together, you don’t know how your partner is going to react. You don’t know what they need.”
She added: “I needed to slam doors and cry really hard and howl. He has been so supportive. He was so generous with his own privacy in allowing me to put this out there. Because it isn’t just me, it’s our story. And I can’t thank him enough for letting me process in this way. … The gift that he’s given me is being able to put this out there and invade his personal bubble. He’s a good man.”
