With AMC’s long-shambling zombie apocalypse drama The Walking Dead stubbornly and appropriately refusing to die (the show’s tenth season premieres on October 6), everyone’s favorite long-winded psychopath, the baseball bat-weilding Negan, has been cooling his heels in the slammer. According to Negan himself, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, all that’s about to change, as—thanks to a years-long time jump after the destabilizing exit of stalwart TWD leading man Rick Grimes—Negan is preparing to complete the sentence that post-apocalyptic society deems adequate for graphically braining some beloved characters and setting oneself up as a bloviating feudal dictator. According to Morgan, the Negan we’ll get upon his release is still very much up in the air, although a clip where he smirkingly tells Seth Gilliam’s Father Gabriel that a newly arrived menace has everyone in the post-Rick survivor community readying their “shittin’ pants” suggests Negan’s still really into hearing himself talk.
Still, as Morgan told Conan O’Brien on Monday’s Conan, lots of other people are also really into hearing Negan talk. Like, really into it. Telling Conan about how he and fellow zombie-killer Norman Reedus were swamped with ravenous fans literally whipping their cellphones at them in hopes of a recent Comic-Con selfie, Morgan also shared the fact that Negan’s particular brand of twinkly, leather-jacketed, alpha-male sadism inspires a segment of Walking Dead fans to proposition the happily married Morgan in ways that even Negan might blanch at. Dancing around the topic initially, Morgan hinted that Negan’s “dominant” personality has caused some fans to present him with gifts of ball-gags, whips, and the like. But that’s nothing compared to the (gender unrevealed) person who proposed that Morgan “use Lucille and make them a popsicle,” which elicited a delayed-until-recognition groan from Conan’s audience, and an expertly mortified slow-burn from O’Brien himself. Morgan himself claims he had to take a beat to “do the math” on what that could possibly mean (with Lucille, of course, being the baseball bat wrapped with barbed wire that is Negan’s weapon of choice), with Conan blurting “There’s not a lot of math needed for this by the way, Jeffrey!” There really isn’t, although Morgan noted that—like all the best people—at least the proposer of said popsicle-ing made the overture via a discreet note.