Jeffrey Dean Morgan says the manager who represented him for years dropped him for being too old right before he landed the roles that made his career. The actor, now 60, shared the story on the August 10 episode of Josh Horowitz’s “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, recalling a stretch in his mid-30s when he had nearly given up on acting altogether.
“I remember being in my mid-30s going, ‘This didn’t work out,'” Morgan said. “And my manager had just fired me right before I got the three shows. I’d been with her forever.” He said she told him bluntly that his window had closed. “She was like, ‘You’ve aged out, bro. You missed your window.’ And she got rid of me and Max Martini at the same time and said the same thing to both of us.”
Within roughly a week of that conversation, Morgan said, offers arrived for “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Supernatural” and “Weeds,” effectively launching the career his former manager had written off. He played Denny Duquette, a heart transplant patient whose romance with Katherine Heigl’s Izzie Stevens became one of the show’s most heartbreaking storylines, appearing in the second and third seasons. Around the same period he played John Winchester, father to the two lead brothers on “Supernatural,” and Judah Botwin on Showtime’s “Weeds.”
Morgan has said elsewhere that the “Grey’s Anatomy” role reshaped his trajectory entirely, crediting it with everything from his casting in “P.S. I Love You” to director Zack Snyder’s decision to put him in “Watchmen.” He went on to headline “The Walking Dead” as Negan starting in 2016, a role he has since reprised across multiple spinoffs. Before the industry turned in his favor, Morgan said he supported himself with manual labor between acting jobs. “I would build fences or whatever,” he said. “It usually involved hammers. There was always something to build for somebody.”
Morgan currently stars in Prime Video’s new series “Sterling Point.”
