The Walking Dead actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan will soon be walking into a spinoff show from the popular AMC series, but he's surprised the show was announced as early as it was.

"Now that we've announced that there's going to be a spinoff, I guess we don't need to die," Morgan said on The Rich Eisen Show. "Spoiler Alert, folks. Sorry! I'm still not sure why we announced that already. It was sort of a shocker to me." Morgan also expressed confusion at being "under orders not to say anything [about the ending] but to continue to talk about [the spinoff.]"

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The Walking Dead premiered in 2010 and it's poised to end with Season 11. At 24 episodes, it will be the longest season to date, and it comes on the heels of the second-longest, Season 10, which had 22. For Morgan, finishing the production of The Walking Dead will almost be a relief. "It's a lot," Morgan said, "but I gotta tell you, man. We've been here for 17-18 months. It's time to go, you know what I mean? I think if it were a regular season and we were only shooting 16 episodes — we did 30 this year — there would be a lot more emotion. But at this point, everybody is just ready to be done and ready to go home."

The news that The Walking Dead would even be renewed for Season 11 came as a shock to Morgan and to everyone else involved. "The news, when we got it in the middle of the pandemic, was a complete surprise, not only to me and the rest of the actors but to everybody involved in the show from production," Morgan recalled. He said that even showrunner Angela Kang and chief content officer Scott M. Gimple were unaware that this was the final season. "I think they had Season 11 all mapped out, where they were going to go, and suddenly it became, 'We also have to close the story, in a way,'" Morgan said.

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With the main show coming to an end, AMC will focus on a series of both existing and new spinoffs. Isle of the Dead will focus on Morgan's Negan Smith and Lauren Cohan's Maggie Rhee as they journey through New York City about a year after the final episodes of The Walking Dead. Another as yet untitled spinoff will feature the popular duo of Norman Reedus' Daryl Dixon and Melissa McBride's Carol Peletier and will have Kang as its showrunner.

New episodes of The Walking Dead air every Sunday on AMC, and are available to stream a week early on AMC+.

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Source: The Rich Eisen Show, via Pajiba