‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan “Hated” That Squirm-Inducing Series Premiere Cockroach Scene

With a collective 15+ seasons of The Walking Dead under their belts, you’d think nothing could scare The Walking Dead: Dead City stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan. You would be wrong. In the series premiere of the new spinoff, and spoilers past the point, the duo hides from zombie stockbrokers literally raining down on Wall Street like it’s George Romero’s version of Black Friday, only to get covered in cockroaches thanks to a mountain of infested garbage bags.

“I hated it,” Morgan told Decider about the scene, laughing. “I hated it when I read it in the script. I hated it when we shot it. I don’t like bugs. Put me in with snakes and I’m okay. I’m like Harrison Ford with cockroaches as he is with snakes.”

In the new series, Morgan’s Negan and Cohan’s Maggie Rhee head to Manhattan to try and rescue Maggie’s son, who has been taken hostage by a villain named The Croat (Željko Ivanek) who has ties to Negan’s past. And though the pilot episode of the spinoff takes its time getting there, as soon as the duo — with a young Marshal who has been chasing them in tow — lands on the shores of the city, the episode hits the gas on non-stop New York references, filtered through the lens of post-apocalyptic zombie horror.

That includes the aforementioned cockroaches. Trying to avoid a herd of non-raining zombies walking up Wall Street slower than Times Square tourists, the trio duck behind garbage bags that frankly, wouldn’t look out of place if you passed by them on the streets of Downtown right now. Things quickly turn sour when a roach crawls on Negan, then Maggie, and then when a bag rips open it’s revealed the decades-old trash is festering with the insects.

Don’t worry too much for Cohan and Morgan. Most of the effects weren’t practical, so it wasn’t like the actors had to deal with picking bugs out of their hair for the rest of the night. But even with a relative respite on set, they were both still totally creeped out.

“The quiet scuttle, you don’t know it’s there and then it’s here and it’s here and it’s here,” Cohan recalled. “Our special effects, our visual effects team did such an amazing job.”

Added Morgan, “To see the finished result, was awesome. I mean, it was tremendous. I loved it. I thought it played really well. But yeah, cockroaches, no man.”

The Walking Dead: Dead City airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC, and streams early Thursdays on AMC+.