Jeffrey Dean Morgan carries Lucille around everywhere on ‘Walking Dead’ sets

Lucille made her dramatic return on the season 2 premiere of The Walking Dead: Dead City.

While it was not the original Lucille — that barbed-wire covered baseball bat was broken and burned by Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan in The Walking Dead season 10 episode “Here’s Negan” — a new Lucille was born when the Corat handed his old boss a replica, one on which he “made some improvements.” Those improvements included an electric charge that sent one poor Negan naysayer flying back on the season premiere.

The victim’s crime was poo-pooing Negan’s invitation for the three rival New York City gangs to work together to take on the New Babylon forces on their way to Manhattan. “There is no way I am bending the knee to some skinny f—ing bitch ass old man,” said the unsuspecting rival before ending up on the receiving end of a shock and being told, “You’re gonna fight because I say so.”

So why bring back this infamous relic from the past? “I think a big part of the show was always wanting to see the old Negan back in one way or another,” says executive producer and Walking Dead chief content officer Scott M. Gimple. “Even in the last few years of The Walking Dead, he became such a different person, and that’s such a huge kind of iconic character that in some ways was gone.”

So to go full Negan, they had to reunite the man with his favorite instrument of death and destruction. “To bring him back, you would need a Lucille for that,” Gimple explains.

But it turns out it’s not just Negan that needs Lucille. It’s the actor as well. “Jeffrey could use Lucille,” says Gimple. “He loves Lucille very much. He does not leave Lucille when he goes to his trailer. He actually takes Lucille when he goes to his trailer. He would leave Lucille on a seat when it wasn’t being used. He wasn’t turning it back in to the props department. The only time that props would get Lucille is at the end of the day.”

In fact, Morgan’s relationship with his trusty bat reminds Gimple of a classic song from, of all things, An American Tail: “You could see Jeffrey singing ‘Somewhere Out There’ when he didn’t have Lucille.”

However, as a season 2 trailer showed, Negan will not be the only one picking up Lucille this season. Maggie will also lay hands on the replica of the bat that killed her husband. So what did it feel like for actress Lauren Cohan to pick up Lucille?

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“It’s really funny because there’s not been a signature weapon that Maggie’s had through all these years,” notes Cohan. “And it’s always something where I’m like, ‘Should I do it? Should I find a thing?’ But I always sort of just liked the shoes, a knife, whatever’s handy. But in the back of my mind, I have always had this feeling like, ‘What would it be like?’ And it’s not that it gave me that feeling to pick up Lucille. Not that I have a history being on that side of Lucille — see what I did there? — but there’s obviously a lot of energy in this weapon.”

Continues Cohan: “I was surprised myself when I picked up the bat in that scene. It was like it’s charged, and not just because it’s electrified. Obviously, the way that Negan wields the bat is so much of what the bat’s about, and it’s otherwise a pretty dull blood object. But at the moment we see Maggie pick it up, it’s an equally wieldy moment.”

When she actually wields it, however, remains to be seen.