The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus Explains Why His Nude Scenes Involve Wet Socks and

Makeup
Things have been going pretty well for Norman Reedus lately. The Walking Dead just
had its eighth season premiere, and as he told Jimmy Kimmel last night at the very start of
their interview, the crossbow he carries as Daryl Dixon is now in the Smithsonian (alongside
a prop of Hiram's severed head).
Things haven't been going as well for Daryl, though. On top of, you know, living
through a zombie apocalypse, he also spent most of last season being beaten and tortured, and
he was nude for a good chunk of that. Reedus, ever the professional, took it in stride: "You
know, the thing is, they give you this little sock to wear. And you feel weirder with the sock
on, you know?"
Jimmy Kimmel, like most people, had a lot of follow-up questions about the sock. Are
we talking like a regular ankle sock? Is it single-use? Can you find it on Amazon?
Quick interruption. That's not exactly an answer to any of Kimmel's questions, but
who cares, because we just learned that Norman Reedus threw a used, presumably wet dick
sock at a director's head and kept getting work after that. May we all be half as good at our
jobs as that. Though apparently Reedus is not a fan of the sock in general.
But on The Walking Dead, I came out in a bathrobe, and our poor camera crew were
all right here. And I just dropped the robe and I was just butt naked, and they all were like
they were watching Wimbledon: They just looked to the left. I have this makeup artist,
Addison, who had to sort of...dirty me, in areas. So we became very close by the end of the
day.
Here's hoping Addison finally gets that Emmy nod for "Best Junk-Dirtying Makeup
Job."

Walking Dead Fan Bit Star Norman Reedus

Reedus, to his credit, is being really nice about it
The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus attended a zombie convention this weekend,
where he probably expected to meet plenty of fans and zombie enthusiasts and
probably didn't expect to get bitten. But that's life (or undead life, at least), because he did get
bitten. Um, yikes. A fan apparently bit Reedus on the chest which, you know, I guess if you're
going to go for it, really go for it.
The bite didn't break skin and Reedus didn't press charges, which is a very decent
thing to do when someone bites you. You know what happens when a dog bites you? It gets

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put to sleep (I think). You know what happens when a horse bites you? I don't know, but it
happened to my friend Christina when she was a kid, and it sucked. Don't be like that horse.
Remember, folks: Despite what that long stringy mane might indicate, Reedus is not a
zombie. He just hangs out with some on TV. And also zombies don't exist. And also don't bite
strangers in public.

Norman Reedus Took A Long Walk To Get Here

After nearly half a lifetime making dark, violent movies that very few people saw, the
45-year-old actor is the unlikely cornerstone of a dark, violent TV series that tons of people
watch every week. Thanks to The Walking Dead, success has come quite late to Norman
Reedus—too late, thankfully, for him to stop being the fascinating, mordantly funny misfit
he's always been.
Norman Reedus turns up at a restaurant in the countryside of Atlanta on his motorbike,
not far from where he lives in the woods while The Walking Dead is shot. Helmet off, he
looks barely a quick rinse different from his character on the show, Daryl Dixon. "I’m so
tired," he says. "We wrapped this morning at 8:30 a.m." He says that he spent the night
"running for my life...stalking, and running," though he also took time to Instagram a photo of
the full moon above the Georgia night forest.
Although** **Reedus, who is 45, has been acting since his late twenties, not too many
people recognized him when he first walked sullenly with his crossbow into The Walking
Dead’s third episode—a character who was not even in the source comic books and was only
intended as a supporting role but has come to feel like the show’s very center. Few of the
movies Reedus had made until then had found much of an audience, and he’s clearly grateful
for this unexpected change in circumstance. He rhapsodizes about how The Walking Dead has
changed his life and his lifestyle: living out in the woods, riding a motorcycle to and from set
each day "through these little two-lane roads with cows going by and the sun coming up or
going down, and it’s really great, you know?"
We will talk about the show, but we begin with the strange and sometimes discordant
journey that has brought him here—a route that takes in some very strange movies, a parallel
life as an artist; a long relationship with the Danish model Helena Christensen from which he
has a 14-year-old son, Mingus; a horrendous car accident that has left him with a titanium eye
socket; a complicated childhood and—perhaps most incongruously of all—a teenage stint on
the competitive youth tennis circuit. While in person Reedus has plenty of the same awkward

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tenderness that shines through in his portrayal of Daryl Dixon (though, as on-screen, you feel
like he’d close down and cut you dead if you called him on it), he also has—as will become
clear—an idiosyncratic sensibility that is sometimes startlingly dark and contrary.
Is it true that you were beginning to think seriously about giving up acting before
this show came along? I was definitely becoming a little down on it, but I don’t know if I
were going to give it up. But I wasn’t enjoying it as much, to be honest.
What was wrong?
I had been in a few films where I thought we were going in this direction and then,
after the editing and the music and it’s put together, it was sort of going in a different
direction I didn’t feel so connected to. And there were a few films I had done that the
advertising for the film or the promotions for the film ended up being a different animal than
the film itself—so you have one character in the film that has one line but he happens to be in
a hit something somewhere, and the posters and the advertising and the publicity become
about that. And I was kinda like: This isn’t really what I signed up for. Or actors I was
working with, we weren’t on the same page. I wasn’t really in it for the fame or the money or
anything like that. Before [becoming an actor] I kind of just wanted to paint and live
somewhere and do something low-key and artistic. When you do a painting, or even
photography or something like that, you can put it on the wall and you can show it to a room
full of people and you can sort of stand over in the corner. But when you’re acting, you get
criticized over your face and your body language and your voice and your haircut—all this
weird shit. And that got larger and larger and larger while the art itself sort of got smaller and
smaller and smaller. And I wasn’t really satisfied, to be honest.
So before The Walking Dead came along, what did you think you were looking
for?
Just peace with myself. Sort of a quiet happy life. I wasn’t really looking for anything
other than being satisfied with what I’m doing every day, and being excited about what I’m
doing every day. I really matured a lot in my mind and become a happier person in this job
because I really like this job and I like the people I work with and I like the environment I
work in. I mean, I’m not saying that I don’t like the success of the job, but I really like going
to work every day and I really like coming home and feeling satisfied with what I did today.
And, you know, the cuts on my forehead, and the bruises, and the black eyes, it doesn’t
matter, it’s awesome. I think that mentality has matured me a lot in the past couple years, you
know. I care more about what I’m doing, too.

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 You’ve been a lot of movies before now, but I think it’s fair to say that people
won’t have seen most of them.
Correct, yeah.
How would you best summarize what those movies were?
They’re all little yearbooks of my life [laughs wryly]. When I did Six Ways to
Sunday, [a little-seen 1997 movie in which Reedus acts alongside an eclectic cast including
Adrien Brody, Isaac Hayes, and Debbie Harry, playing a psychotic eighteen-year-old with
macabre mother issues] I was at a very quirky...[stops himself]...I hate that word, "quirky."
It’s like the worst fucking word in the world._ [begins again] _I was at a very experimental
phase in my life. And it was fun, and it was interesting, and I was having a good time. And
then at the same time I’m punching Isaac Hayes in the nose. I mean, it all sort of fit together.
When I did _Floating, _[his second lead role, earlier in 1997, an only slightly less dark
coming-of-age tale] I was at a very reflective time in my life, and that was that movie. When I
did The Boondock Saints, [_the over-the-top 1999 revenge drama that was his most successful
role until _The Walking Dead] I was a very energetic wild person. They’re all very much me.
Even the character on this show—now I’m very happy with who I am and I’m confident with
who I am, but I still have my dukes up, and that’s the character I’m playing right now. So it’s
all very much me, you know?
All told, you’ve been in some pretty dark, sick movies.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Why were you drawn to things like that?
Even with photography and artwork, I’ve really liked having grotesque things and
finding beauty in them. I’ve always been a fan of horror films and I like aggressive music and
I like aggressive people—they all kind of were interesting to me. I mean I really don’t see
myself ever being, or wanting to be, in some sort of light romantic comedy about nothing.
I think they’re supposed to be about romance and comedy, not about nothing.
Yeah. That’s true. But they always end up being about nothing, you know what I
mean?
Well, in a lot of people’s lives those things are considered really important.
[laughs] Yeah. I don’t know any of those people.
In fact a lot of people prioritize an interest in those things over, say, a movie
about sleeping with your mother.

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 That’s true, yeah. I guess I don’t. You know? Sleeping with Debbie Harry and killing
her and taking her dead body on a bus out of town is one of my fondest memories, you know
what I mean? What do you want? What can I say?
And how many people can say that?
Yeah. It’s pretty great. Just me.
What you referred to earlier—taking the grotesque or the shocking, and the
finding the beauty in it...why do you think you like to do that?
Because I’m curious about it. I think I might have thought of myself as that at one
point, growing up. Not being super concerned with the outside and more on the inside, and
how do I make the inside pretty? And what’s so bad about not feeling pretty inside? Maybe
that had something to do with it. I like the underdog. I was more of a listener than a talker as a
kid, and I would really suss people out before I opened my mouth. I like feeling, or I liked
feeling, a bit on the outside for my own personal secretive reasons.
You can’t expect to say a phrase like "my own personal secretive reasons"
without me trying to ask about them.
Well, you know, if you feel socially awkward there’s reasons why you feel socially
awkward. Maybe you feel socially awkward on the outside because inside you don’t feel like
you fit in. And I like feeling like I don’t fit in, and I’ve always liked feeling like I don’t fit in
and I’m perfectly cool with it. When someone would fake it to fit in on the outside it really
rubbed me the wrong way, you know. I’m more of a Francis Bacon guy and less of a Banksy
guy, you know what I’m saying?
That’s a really interesting specific mindset: not just not fitting in but liking the
feeling of not fitting in.
I prefer it, and I like people like that. I always liked shy and sort of interesting people,
rather than pretty people trying to please everybody—I always dislike them right off the bat.
When you’re disliking those people, what are you thinking they’re doing wrong,
or getting wrong about the world?
Oh, I don’t know. It’s becoming part of the socially accepted norm, I guess. I find it
very uninteresting. And I guess I didn’t fit in with those people, didn’t like those people, grew
up not wanting to be one of those people. I don’t know. I like dark things. I like reasons why
things are dark, you know.
What do you mean?
You know, like tears can be very pretty. Like when someone’s crying and feeling
horrible—watching that happen, or watching yourself do that, finding those little minute

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reasons and avenues that lock into why they feel like that, there’s something very cathartic
and beautiful about it. I think once I sort of accepted parts of that in myself, I felt better about
myself. Does that make sense?
Yes, it makes good sense to me. But to play devil’s advocate, I guess the more
popular twenty-first-century American way is to think: Why not just use that energy to
try to be happy?
Yeah, but what is happy? What does that mean? [derisively] Happy, happy, happy. I
mean, I would rather listen to an old Cure song and get really introspective than "I’m walking
on sunshine...everyone hold hands and jump up and down and smile". It’s way more
interesting to me. I know you’re saying, "Why?," but I don’t know. That’s going to take years
of therapy. I have no idea.
When you did interviews for your movies before The Walking Dead, you’d often
declare "I kill someone in every movie I’m in."
I kind of do.
Well, it’s not literally true, but it is true-ish.
It’s more than not. When have I not killed someone? [He runs through some
homicidal highlights, pointing out that in the rare cases when he doesn’t actually kill, he is
usually either trying to kill or otherwise culpable for a death.]
It’s a point of pride?
No, it’s just a humorous fact. I mean, I’d rather, I think it’s as interesting to
psychologically fuck someone up, probably more so, than to just kill them, you know what I
mean?
I love how you say that as though those are really the only two possible options.
[laughs] And if you’re lucky you get both.
I came across this quote you once said about Six Ways to Sunday that seems like
the epitome of you describing these kinds of movies, and embracing them in a way few
people usually do: "The violence was really fun. I liked the part where I slice my
friend’s throat. I liked cutting him up, it was nice, and I end up grinding his skull with a
jackhammer, it was great."
[laughs] Adrien! [Adrien Brody plays his unfortunate friend] Did I say that? There
was a comedic thing about it—like if you watch a scary movie and you scream and laugh at
the same time. It was kind of like that that gave me a nice energy. It was all kind of fun and
interesting to me. It was like a roller coaster.
To act it out?

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 Yeah. [pause] I would never do that in real life.
Thank you for that reassuring addendum.
Of course not. I like Adrien. I would never jackhammer his head into the ground.
The way you put that weirdly opens up the possibility that you might do so to
someone you were less fond of.
No! I wouldn’t want to make such a mess.
And now you’re making it sound like it’s just a tidiness issue.
Fuck. You know what I mean.
In that era of your unrelentingly dark movie roles, in interviews you often used to
bring up the particular notion that you weren’t the kind of person to end up in a
Jennifer Love Hewitt movie.
I just think she’s cute. I think my mother brought it up once. [He has quoted her
saying, for instance: "Why can’t you just do a nice little role, romantic comedy with Jennifer
Love Hewitt or something?"]
But this does also actually relate to a specific job offer, right
Well, there was a movie she did with Sigourney Weaver, and I think Jason Lee played
the part. [The 2001 movie Heartbreakers.] When that came around my agents at the time were
"They like you for this part, and it’s a Jennifer Love Hewitt movie." And I’m, like, "Well,
what do I do?" And they’re "You’re her boyfriend." And I go, "Well, do I rape her? Do I kill
her? What do I do?" And they go, "You’re her sweet boyfriend." And I was like, "No!
Absolutely not!" But yeah, I just assumed I had to rape and kill her.
Because?
Just ’cause that’s who I was. Who I thought that everyone thought I was.
Obviously you do sound psychotic in that discussion.
Yeah. I mean, I look back now and I guess it’s kind of funny, but it was true. I actually
thought: They must want me to kill someone. [shrugs] Tie her up? I just figured that’s what
they wanted.
Because most of your roles veered that way?
Yeah. You know, you get hired at what you’re good at, I guess. [laughs] Being
stereotyped in that way is totally fine by me. I thought it was kind of fun. My favorite actors
are Willem Dafoe and Gary Oldman and Christopher Walken and I don’t see any of those
guys you know doing romantic comedies on a beach, you know what I’m saying? I like those
people. I like the wrinkles in their faces. I like them being them.

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 And so, in those days, when people expected you to be something, what did they
assume you were?
Just troubled, dark, angry, quietly hostile, dangerous. But it’s not just dangerous like
you know the guy on the mountaintop with the gun, it was more like you know there was a
seductive way of luring something evil into their world which I found very interesting.
Typically it seems to me you were the guy who seemed sweet at the beginning of
the movie...
Isn’t that super-interesting, though?
...but who very quickly turns out to be malevolently evil.
Yeah, super-interesting. I love that. You know, I get quoted a lot for saying "I like it
when devils cry and angels stab you in the back." I really find that more interesting than "I’m
a big bad wolf and I’m just gonna be a big bad wolf the whole time." I think it’s more
interesting to see that wolf cub turn into a bad wolf, you know?
Don’t you have devils tattooed on your back?
Yeah. An old lady in California, she was supposedly psychic and had a great intuition
and whatnot, and she told me I had three little devils that were always around me. One was a
smaller devil and the two were larger more physical devils, but the little one would always
whisper in my ear and make me make the wrong decisions and the other ones would sort of
get in my head and force me to do these wrong decisions or persuade me to do the bad
decisions. And at that time I was doing a lot of bad decisions and I just said, "Fuck it, I’ll just
call you out." You know: "I see you." It was kind of like that. Like, I know you’re there. It’s
kind of like if you hear knocks at night in your house and you’re convinced there’s a ghost, if
you just start yelling at him he’ll go away. It was something like that.
So was she right?
Yeah, I think they kind of worked themselves out. There was definitely something.
Who knows—maybe it was all in my head and she read my mind. I have no idea. But, I mean,
I’m not afraid of it, you know.
Are the devils still there?
Yeah. Maybe we just get along a little better. I don’t know. Maybe we see eye to
eye...to eye to eye to eye to eye. I think they’ve matured quite a bit.
That’s a novel concept: devils maturing.
You know, they gotta relax at some point. I don’t really do the things that I used to do
but I still kind of have the thought of "let’s burn that thing down," you know. I still like that,
I’m still into that. I like the smell of gasoline. I like an explosion, you know. You know,

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people say, "Oh, we’ll riot if this happens...", I’m like "Let’s do it! Let’s burn the DMV!" But,
you know, you pick your battles.
Do you ever follow through on stuff like that?
Well, it’s like the big bruise on my forearm. With that compound bow, I knew that it’s
going to hit me, but I just wanted to shoot it anyway. And it slapped me and I had a huge
bruise.
What were you firing at?
I went and bought a target actually—this big square thing with circles and a deer head
on it. Melissa McBride, who plays Carol on the show, I was driving by her house and I
couldn’t wait to come back here to shoot it, so I called her up, I was like, "What are you
doing?" She says, "I’m walking my dog." I’m, "I’m coming over right now," and I came over
with this crossbow and this target. I’m like "We’re shooting this!" She’s like, "Oh, my God,
that’s gotta be illegal." I’m like, "No one’s looking." The guy who was supposed to make it
shorter wasn’t there so I knew it was gonna hurt me, and I just had to shoot it. Because it was,
like, burning a hole in my hand.
Winding back to the Jennifer Love Hewitt offer, once you had established that
neither rape, murder, or bondage were part of the deal, why exactly was that role of no
interest to you?
I think maybe possibly because of fear. Maybe I thought I couldn’t do anything other
than those things. I think also that at that time just the idea of "Okay and rolling! Take five...
You’re happy!" would be super hard for me to do. "Eughh, what does that look like? Am I
doing it right? Am I smiling big? Do I look happy?" Maybe there’s a fear in that. Or a fear of
being totally fucking bored. I don’t know. You look at those movies, those comedians, and
they’re like buddy buddies and they’re doing things like that, it looks difficult to me. It looks
like that would be very hard to pull off. I mean, one of the things I like about comedians in
general is they seem like some of the saddest people on the planet. And that’s interesting. I
think there’s a sadness that you have to embrace to be that funny and I don’t know if I ever
want to embrace that sadness in that way. Or if I’m even sad enough to be that funny.
So in the same answer you’ve questioned whether you can be sad enough or
whether you can be happy enough.
I questioned whether I’m sad enough to appear that happy in a fake world.
Though can I suggest that there are many actors who believe that conveying
emotions such as happiness and sadness is even easier than portraying homicidal
impulses or psychopathic impulses.

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 I don’t know those people either. I don’t know—it seems very difficult just to, you
know, smile. And smile! And smile! Like, I’m a horrible model. I’m awful at it.
So were you surprised when you did find yourself a model? [In Reedus’s early
acting years, he was the face of a major Prada campaign]
Yeah. I mean I’m short and fat and drink beer. [He explains that it all came about after
Miuccia Prada happened to see some photos Ellen von Unwerth took on the set of Six Ways to
Sunday.]
Did you like doing it?
No, hated it. Fucking hated it.
Were you already with Helena Christensen at that point?
It was kind of just before.
Though weren’t you with another model before her?
I’ve been with several. Not any to the extent that... Helena and I were pretty serious.
Well, I know. You had a child. That’s usually a token of seriousness.
[nods] Pretty fucking serious.
Reedus says that he only woke up two hours ago. At the table, he drinks a coffee, but
refuses a second. "I’m so jacked on coffee," he explains to the waitress, "that I’m about to
chew a crop circle in this table." (He has a sweet iced tea instead.)
As we talk on and he nibbles at his spinach salad, we are buzzed by an intruder. "This
fucking fly," he says, swiping away at it. "I’m going to kill it." He does not, but he clearly
remains irritated by it. "I don’t know, I’m one of those people that, like, I can get hit by a bus
and I can go ’Oh well, that’s life’. And then I’ll lose my keys and I’ll be pissed off for an hour
and a half, you know."
When did you realize that what you were doing on _The Walking Dead _had hit a
really unusual chord with the world?
Oh God. I mean, we shoot it out here in this little bubble and we don’t really mingle
with the rest of society, we only do our little thing here. But I think after the first or second
season, the amount of people that wanted autographs or wanted pictures or were just
congratulating me on the show, it went from like ten to ten thousand. I think between second
and third season, you really started to feel it.
But at what point did you first start getting this sort of avalanche of stuff that
made it clear that people related to this character in a very particular way?
Fan mail? Yeah. I get a bunch. I don’t know. It doesn’t ever fluctuate. It only gets
bigger and bigger and bigger.

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 So in a typical week, how much?
To the point where production asked me to no longer have it sent to the studio because
it takes up a room. It goes to my manager’s and my agent’s, my publicist’s office, then every
couple of weeks they send me giant bos full. I mean, I have a whole room in New York that’s
just full of toys that people have either made or built.
What’s the strangest thing anyone’s sent you in recent times?
Um, I got a breast implant.
That was pretty early on, right?
Oh, recently? Last night this kid gave me his Special Olympics medal he won for
soccer. He was one of the people waiting at the fence when I left set this morning. A girl and
her brother recently gave me a New York fireman uniform from their father who died in 9/11.
I was, ’you can’t give this to me’ and they were so insistent. You know, sometimes you’ll get
gifts that aren’t like crazy fan gifts but they’ll say "You know your character on the show is a
fighter and I related to him in a time in my life when I needed to fight something and be
strong." Sometimes gifts like that make me feel really good about what I’m doing. It has
nothing to do with interviews or the popularity of the show or anything like that, it has to do
with there’s a certain part of me that I put into this character, and somehow they tune into
whatever I’m feeling that the character’s feeling and relate it with their own lives—that’s
really a good feeling. I’ve had people tell me that the Daryl character has helped them fight
cancer: There’s cancer groups that are named after Daryl. I mean, I can get a goofy little
Daryl present, or somebody goes, "You know what, you’ve affected me in a positive way." So
it’s a combination of those and people’s breast implants—it just goes all over the place.
You still have the famous breast implant?
Yeah, it’s still my phone cradle in my trailer.
Which is weird and wrong.
It’s kind of awesome—it makes a perfect phone cradle.
I read that the woman who sent it to you did so because she felt you looked
depressed.
That’s what the note said. She said she read an interview and I sounded depressed,
which I didn’t, I wasn’t. I think I just came off that way.
I was interested in what you said once—that you play Daryl as if he’s a virgin.
I don’t know if it’s like a virgin but it’s definitely somebody that’s not got game. He’s
definitely not a ladies man, or thinks of himself as having enough confidence to be that type
of person. I want to play him searching for confidence, not full of confidence, you know what

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I mean? I like all the little things that are awkward. I like when a boy meets a girl, doesn’t
know what to say and says the wrong thing, and she notices that and he notices that she
notices that. I think that’s all very interesting and I would rather play him like not somebody
that’s got cool guy moves or anything like that.
I do like the extremity of him perhaps being a virgin.
Yeah, totally. You know, a virgin is interesting. I remember Frank Darabont, after the first
season we were at a party in L.A., He said, ’I’ve got an idea for Daryl. He’s gay. Would you
be interested in that?’ I was like, ’Let me hear you out.’ He said, ’Well, he’s prison gay—like,
you’ll catch him looking at a member of the same sex, but if you mention it to him, he’ll just
stab you and be like what the fuck?—he will never admit it.’ I was like, ’That’ll blow minds
—let’s do that.’ And he said, ’I knew I hired you for a reason.’ "
And then they fired him.
Had nothing to do with that. But I like playing all these different things. Daryl’s not
the type of guy who’s gonna throw somebody up against a tree in the moonlight. I don’t see
him as having that kind of confidence. You could drop him off in the middle of the woods
with a stick and he’ll come back well fed and doing well, but I don’t think in matters of the
heart he’s real secure.
Just physically playing, and mentally occupying, that character for so many months a
year, do you think it’s changed you?
I think as the character has progressed in the last couple years I maybe similarly have
progressed in my own life. I think I was very nervous when I started and I’m more confident
now, I think the character was more nervous than he is now. I mean, I have crossbows and
compound bows and shoot them now. When I started I was living in Chinatown and I was
terrified of bugs. Now I have tick bites all over me, and I’ll just, "Whatever..." So, yeah,
there’s certain similarities.
What do you think the challenge is going to be to keep Dixon interesting?
Well, one of the best things about this show is that it constantly keeps moving and
constantly keeps evolving into something else. It’s not about a house full of people protecting
themselves and zombies coming into the house every day. If you keep the ball rolling at all
times it never gets stale, and I think we’ve been very good at keeping the ball rolling. There’s
always critics—"Oh, this season was too slow," "This season was too action-packed and not
enough talking." I hear those comments early on in the year after I’ve already shot ten more
episodes that you haven’t seen yet, and I know what’s coming and I just have to keep my

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mouth shut and can’t tell you just to sit tight. We cover all the bases on the show. As long as
we keep it moving and keep it fresh and interesting, it’ll stay fresh and interesting.
Though there’s obviously many other things that have made The Walking
Dead what is has become, it’s clear that a certain part of the audience couldn’t possibly
take any more delight in seeing ever-more-creative ways for people’s brains to be
crushed or for their guts to spill out.
A lot of people like it. And you’d be surprised the creative ways that they come with
doing that that you haven’t seen before, it’s kind of mind-blowing. Just wait till this season—
there’s some new stuff that’s like, I never would have thought of. It’s pretty hard-core.
And if anyone found that aspect of it sort of repulsive or immoral, what do you
think?
I mean, it’s just television. It’s a fantasy world—it’s a zombie apocalypse. You can
watch CNN and see much worse stuff.
Obviously, as all cast members of _The Walking Dead _do, you’ve been asked a
zillion times over what you would do in a zombie apocalypse. But unlike most other
people, all your answers tend to involve nudity and masturbation.
[laughs] _What else would I do? I just go to my two favorite things, I guess. You know,
nudity, masturbation, and cartoons, that’s pretty much always my answer. Do what I love on
the way out.
I hope this doesn’t give an insight as to what you get up to in your house in the
woods.It’s pretty similar. With the occasional bow injury.
For years Norman Reedus has told the same story of how he became an actor: Having
followed a girl who soon dumped him from Japan to Los Angeles, he found himself doing a
menial job he hated in a bike shop. One day he was fired; that night he went to a Hollywood
party and starting acting the fool. For some reason one of the other guests told him he should
be an actor, and as a result he was offered a part in a play. On the play’s first night he got an
agent. Soon after, he was cast in his first movie, Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic.
He’s stuck to this script so consistently over the years that it may simply be how he
now imagines it happened, but a little checking of dates and details suggests it couldn’t have
been quite as compact and smooth. I ask him to tell me about that, and about some other
strange moments in his life that led here, and he does, though occasionally he gets distracted.
"Look," he says at one point, as though marveling in his new Georgia awareness and
needing to share it. "There’s a tick on the window." It’s barely more than a dark speck, on the
other side of the glass a few yards away. "See that?" he says, quietly satisfied.

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 When you first got to Los Angeles, what were you thinking that you wanted?
I didn’t really know, to be honest. I don’t know that I was wanting anything. I wasn’t
really that driven.
So if you hadn’t lost your job one day and gone to that party the same night, none
of this would have happened?
Yeah. I mean, I don’t know how the hell it would have if that didn’t happen. Or maybe
it would have. I don’t know, I have no idea.
What was going on in your head at that party to start acting out like that?
I don’t know—maybe there was a room full of famous people. Or people that wanted
to be famous. It was a big fancy house with rich people. A Hollywood Hills party. I was
probably already drunk by the time I walked in the door. I had something against rich L.A.
people, I think, right off the bat so maybe that was part of the reason I acted out? I don’t
know.
What did you actually do? What were you saying?
Oh, I can’t remember what I was rambling about but I had taken this girl’s glasses and
one of the arms was broken so I had them over my eyes and I was yelling down at the people,
talking about my secret identity. All this crap I can’t even remember. Then the glasses would
fall off and I’d push them back on. And somebody came up to me and asked me if I wanted to
be in a play. And I was like, "Get away from me." Then we all ended up going for pizza and
they talked me into being in this play.
Ever since, it seems like when you tell the story it gets collapsed pretty quick: Go
to the party, get the play, get an agent, and then suddenly you’re making movies.
Yeah.
But what year was the play?
I don’t know. We can Google it.
I believe it’s 1991.
Then you probably know, yeah.
And your first movie came out in 1997.
Yeah.
So that’s six years.
Yeah. Is that a long time or not a long time?
Well, you usually make it sound as though it was literally the next week you
made Mimic.

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 I was doing other things. I was doing art shows in L.A. Bouncing around with
girlfriends. Just living my life. I wasn’t really over-pursuing anything. I wasn’t really under-
pursuing anything.
And in the meantime, that’s when you made most of those music videos you’re
in?
Yeah, there was a series of directors then—David Fincher, Tarsem Singh, Mark
Romanek—and I started dating a girl who was sort of in that world. They sort of passed me
around to each other. Because you’re cheap—you don’t cost very much money. You’re not an
established person. I did R.E.M. ["Strange Currencies"]. And Björk ["Violently Happy"].
Keith Richards ["Wicked As It Seems"]. Radiohead ["Fake Plastic Trees"]. Those were fun to
do, to be honest.
And were you thinking: I’m building up my résumé as an actor? Or thinking that
you were an artist, and that you occasionally had these other weird things to do?
More like that. I’d pay my rent with those and, you know, take classes learning how to
weld better. I really wasn’t that motivated to be doing what I’m doing now, if that’s what you
mean.
So before you really started making films, if you met someone who you hadn’t
seen for a while and they said "What do you do?," would you have said you were an
artist, or...
I never really liked that term: artist. "Oh, I’m an artist, everyone!" You know, L.A. has
that certain thing about it where, "So what do you do?" "Oh, I’m a photographer." "So what
are you working on?" "Oh, I shot the Chili Peppers in ’84." "Well, what are you doing now?"
"Oh, I shot the Chili Peppers in ’84." Everyone’s an artist. It’s kind of annoying. It just seems
too pretentious to be like "I’m an artist." I like the quiet type of people—their work speaks for
what they do and they don’t have to announce what they do.
But even so you were pretty serious about your art?
Well, I was doing it, and I was interested in it. But I didn’t have a business card or
anything. It wasn’t a message I was trying to sell to the world or a title I was trying to give
myself. I was just hanging out with artists doing art and I was enjoying it.
Were you good at it?
Yeah, I was good at certain parts of it. I was never a good fine artist but I was good at
expressing myself and I was good at coming up with ideas on how to do that. And, you know,
[he is shifting the conversation closer to the present day] I direct little short films—I also shot
them, I also edited them.

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 They’re not...light, those films.
You’ve seen them?_ [I nod]_ Oh, wow, how’d you see them?
You sell them on your website. I paid you money.
All right. Um, yeah, they were dark. The first one I came up with in Berlin in the hospital
room after these surgeries. I was, "I’m never going to be in another film—that’s never going
to happen, because I look like hamburger right now."
Before that accident, in 2005, you’d just been to see a R.E.M. concert?
Yeah. I went to the Berlin film festival. I was getting a rising-star award. The day I got
there, Michael [Stipe] called and said, "Do you want to come to the show tonight?" He gave
me shout-out on stage—"This is for Norman!" It was awesome. After the concert I said, "I
have to take a cab back to the hotel to meet this director," and he’s, like, "No, take my driver."
He gave me a driver who, like, got from here to that wall [indicates a distance of a few
yards] and we got hit by an eighteen-wheeler. He pulled out in front of a truck. I remember
looking down at my BlackBerry, that was the last thing I remembered. I went through the
window onto the street.
Did you really think you looked so bad that you’d never get your looks back?
Oh, dude, I was hideous. I could show you pictures and you wouldn’t finish your pizza.
People were trying to come visit me and I wouldn’t let anyone come visit me. It was really
like the Hunchback of Notre Dame thing going on—really kind of terrifying. My mom, I
wouldn’t let her come. My girlfriend at the time, I wouldn’t let her come. [He explains how
instead he used his time to plan out a short movie, working out the camera moves with toy
soldiers a German director friend brought him] I needed to find something else to do.
Those were nice lighthearted shorts you ended up making. Particularly the one
where someone pretending to be Richard Nixon stabs a prostitute he’s having sex with
in the back at the moment of orgasm.
What’s funny is, Jello Biafra auditioned for the part of Richard Nixon. I have
videotapes of Jello talking like Richard Nixon, which is awesome. He ended up not doing it.
Yeah, I showed that to my mom during Christmas and she told me I ruined Christmas.
They’re quite disturbing.
Yeah, they are disturbing. They’re beautifully shot, don’t you think? And I shot them. And I
learned editing, editing those.
And for a while you were also pushing forward to do your own movie_ [I__ Was
a White Sex Slave in Harlem]_?

16
 Yeah. A film about Margo Howard-Howard, who’s a drag queen—a very inspirational
New York story. But I just got wrapped up in this and never quite finished that—I kind of
dropped the ball on the movie when this show started. And it was going to be very hard to
find an actor that would want to do that. You’d have to have somebody very brave to pull this
off.
But you discussed it with Heath Ledger?
Yeah. Heath was a friend of mine, and he read it and he was, "I’d like to do it." So that ball
started to roll for a minute. He was the only actor that ever said he would do it.
So why didn’t that go forward?
He died.
It was right around then?
Yeah.
Can you still feel that you’ve got a titanium eye socket from the Berlin accident?
Oh yeah. For a long time this [touches above his left eye] and this [below the eye] was
numb, and my top lip was numb. And sometimes if I get a fingernail or something sharp and I
poke certain parts of my head, spiderweb tingles go all the way down my face. If it’s cold
outside, [the metal eye socket] gets cold and I get a headache, and if it’s really hot, it gets hot
and I get a headache. So I have headaches all the time. The first part of the feeling to come
back was my top lip, so sometimes I still poke it with my fingernail as a habit. _[He pushes
his fingernail into his top lip to demonstrate.] _And sometimes if I’m with a girl and we’re
watching a movie or something, I take her fingernail and, sort of like without thinking about
it, I start doing that with her finger. I don’t know why.
Not long afterward, you acted in someone else’s short movie_ [Meet Me in
Berlin]_, which fictionalized your hospital stay in the aftermath of your accident. Is
most of the dialogue in that true?
No.
So you didn’t have a band at school called Vicious Prick?
[looks alarmed] Uh, yes, that happened. Was that in there?
Yes. So what were Vicious Prick like?
Crap. We were awful. It was singing a few Black Flag songs over and over. I sang. I
have no musical talent at all. The best part was I had a great logo, which was an upside down
anarchy sign with the "P."
What did your parents do back when you were born?

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 My father was a businessman. He went through several different businesses. Worked
for a printing company for a while, worked for TV Guide for a while. My mom was going to
school and she had multiple jobs. I don’t like to talk about my mom too much because the last
time I had a four-hour interview I mentioned some of her jobs and she got upset with me.
Playboy Bunny?
Yeah. I went on and on for hours about how strong of a woman my mother was and all
the great things she did, and that’s the only part they used. I mean, my mom, she ran a school
in Kurdistan recently, ran an orphanage. And she’s done amazing jobs. She was teaching high
school in the Bronx for a while. She taught kindergarten in Harlem. But that’s the only part
they put.
That, and that she sold coffins.
Yeah. She called them "eternal beds."
How long were your parents together when you were young?
Not long. I don’t have memories of them ever living together. It was just kind of how
it was—I don’t remember ever growing up being bummed out about it or sad about it. I
remember my mom and my dad always being friends.
Often, over the years, when you’ve talked about acting and the way you’ve
approached various things, you’ve often referenced a sense of feeling emotionally
damaged in reference to your youth.
You know, there was definitely certain things in my childhood that were pretty gnarly
but it wasn’t because they weren’t together. I mean, I don’t want to tell you every dirty detail
of my life because you’re doing an interview. I don’t have any desire to spill my horrible
secrets to you. Rip my chest open. I mean, yeah, there’s bad things that happened to me but I
think it would be dishonorable for me to tell them to benefit the story.
Sure. But you’ve alluded before to facing some violent situations.
Yeah. I don’t allude to those anymore. It doesn’t do me any good to have those out there.
You had to be pretty independent quite young, right?
Yeah, that’s right. When I first left home I was less than 13. I had an opportunity to travel
with a tennis coach for a while.
You actually played on the youth tennis tour?
Yeah. I played indoors in Kalamazoo, I played clay courts, I was sponsored, my
clothes were free, my rackets were free.
Did anyone in your tennis world carry on and become a successful professional?

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Well, I mean, Andre Agassi became really successful. I practiced with him and a group of
people—never one-on-one. He was younger than me, too, and he would have killed me.
Were you thinking: Maybe I could really do this and make it?
I was never really that good. And I was never really that driven at that, either.
Was there a specific point where you said, "This is over"?
It was this one tournament where I had to beat this guy, and I’d sprained my ankle really bad,
and I had it injected with something to numb it, and then I had it in the hotel ice bucket, and I
was just like, "This isn’t fun for me." I just walked away.
There’s one story that I’d like to understand better that you’ve told about your
childhood—about what happened after you saw The Omen.
You’re talking about what I did with the teacher?
Yes. Can you explain exactly what you did?
I’d just glare at her. I’d just be really still and just stare at her, just intently. And she
would take notice of it, and I could see her start to become uncomfortable, which made me
want to do it more.
And you were consciously channeling the boy in The Omen?
Totally. Then she’d go around and ask questions and just skip over me. The more she
did it, the more I wanted to do that. Then at the end of the year she said, "Why do you hate
me?" And I go, "What are you talking about? I love you—I think you’re great." And I felt
bad, but at the same time it was kind of fucking awesome.
I don’t think you feel that bad about it even now!
I really don’t. I mean, it was interesting.
I think I feel more bad for her than you do.
You probably do. And she was a very sweet woman. I don’t know, something about
that character I just connected with. I just liked it. I always liked how the animals freaked out
when he came around, I liked everything about it.
I think most people who see that movie, they’re incredibly engrossed by it, but
they’re shit-scared of the kid. They don’t _identify _with the kid.
Oh, I wanted to be the kid.
I know—that’s what’s disturbing.
He had a secret, and it was a powerful secret. I really liked that influence that he had. I
don’t know. I connected with it.
Did you really think, "I might be devil spawn"?

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 No! I didn’t think that, but it seemed like an interesting role to play. He’s special, you
know what I mean? I mean I guess some kids will get Superman, and they’re like "he’s
great!" And I felt The Omen. Fuck Superman, you know.
Fuck saving people!
Yeah, fuck that! _[sings heroic Superman theme] _Who gives a shit? I like [sings the
ominous Omen theme]. It’s so much more interesting. I mean, even today, if I watch Spider-
Man or something, I root for the bad guy. I like the Joker better than I like Batman, you know
what I mean? I’m still like that.
Why do you root for the bad guy?
I don’t know. I don’t just necessarily like the bad guy, I like the misunderstood bad
guy.
And you’re instinctively prejudiced against the good guy?
I guess so. I guess I am. Chris Heath is a GQ correspondent.

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