The Walking Dead reveals first look at Hilarie Burton as Negan’s wife Lucille

The Walking Dead drops a teaser for its upcoming bonus episodes, including a Negan origin story with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s real-life wife as Lucille.

The eleventh and final season of The Walking Dead may not be coming for a while, but AMC is helping bridge the gap with several bonus episodes of season 10, set to air early next year. It mostly sounds like they’re going to be standalone episodes focused on specific characters. One of them will even dive into the backstory of Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). We’ll even meet his wife Lucille, for whom he named his infamous bat.

What’s more, Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s real-life wife Hilarie Burton will star as Lucille! For any One Tree Hill fans out there, you’ll better know her as Peyton Sawyer (ah, the memories).

And now, thanks to a behind-the-scenes production video, we have our first look at Burton as Lucille in all her greened-hair glory.

Or at least her hair looks green in this trailer. Maybe it’s just the lighting?

Anyway, there aren’t enough words to explain just how excited I am to learn more about Negan’s past. Although he’s chilled out recently, we met Negan when he was a brutal tyrant; the story of how he got there must be fascinating, and much of it has to do with the loss of his wife. There’s a reason he named his baseball bat of death after her, although I don’t know if she’d take that as a compliment. Love is complicated, I suppose.

Burton took to Twitter earlier this month to share the news about her casting, and how excited she was to work with the cast and crew of The Walking Dead, which of course means working with her husband.

It’ll be interesting to see how this episode plays out. Best case scenario, it might even serve as a backdoor pilot for a future Negan spin-off, an idea that’s been in the air recently, with Morgan himself saying that “no doors are closed.”

Time will tell what happens with that. In the meantime, we are super excited to see Burton and Morgan team up to give us the Negan story we’ve always wanted. The first of the bonus episodes airs on February 28.

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h/t NME