Jeffrey Dean Morgan is one of Hollywood’s great unsung heroes. His already lengthy TV and film career shows Morgan’s already wide range from dramas like ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and P.S., I Love You to action-thrillers like The CW’s Supernatural, The Resident and Watchmen to comedies like The Accidental Husband Taking Woodstock.

Now, the recently turned 44 year-old actor stars in what is potentially his biggest role to date as special forces agent Franklin Clay in the action film The Losers. Jeffrey first discussed how the film was brought to his attention and whether he ever read the original graphic novels that the film is based on.

“This, in particular, I read Pete Berg’s version of the script almost four years ago and then, it came around,” Morgan recalls, “Joel [Silver] always had this. There was problems finding the right director and then they went through a couple of different directors, talking to, and then, Joel met Sylvain [White] and that sort of fell together and then, I became aware of the graphic novel. And I had a little bit of work with the graphic novel doing Watchmen, which I love.”

“I think it’s such a great foundation to kind of build off of and probably what Jamie Vanderbilt did even more, as well as Sylvan, who shot this movie, in kind of such an original way,” he continues, “We as actors didn’t know where the cameras were half the time. The palette he used was very much ripped from that graphic novel, so it’s a great way to make a movie on these graphic novels, it’s such an invaluable foundation for making a film. We as actors, you have a skeleton or more of a skeleton for a character that you get to build on and the producers and director really gave us a chance to expand on what Andy [Diggle] and Jock did with the graphic novel, which was awesome.”

With many graphic novels, the risqué violent and

sexual content has made the relatively faithful adaptations of ones like V For Vendetta, A History Of Violence, The Spirit, and Watchmen risky prospects for box office success. However, in a break from the norm, The Losers was rated PG-13, which caused some considerable concern from fans. Morgan though sees the reasons for more restrained violence in this particular story as justified.

“I think at the beginning, when a lot of it came out that this movie was going to be PG-13, I think a lot of people initially were, especially fans of the graphic novel, how can you make Losers a PG-13 movie, I don’t know that there needs to be graphic gore,” he believes.

“The only difference between this movie and say Watchmen, as far as the violence is concerned, is the gore factor,” Jeffrey adds, “We’re not going to see guts and bones hanging off the ceiling in Losers, but the impact of that violence is all the same and within that lies this sort of sense of humor that this movie has and I think that alleviates a lot of some of the moments that maybe people would go, maybe that’s a little too much for a 14 year-old boy to be seeing. We just don’t have those moments because this movie plays with itself and has fun with itself, I think.”

However, the PG-13 rating did not prevent the filmmakers from flirting with risqué content, particularly with the film’s bathtub scene.

“Yeah, it is,” Morgan comments, “[Especially for] the 44 year-old boys. I wanted the naked thing.”

However, Morgan feels the greatest concern to him for the film was doing as much of its stunts as possible.

“With this movie in particular, we wanted to do as much as we possibly could as far as the action sequences and stunts,” Jeffrey says, “We trained a lot. We got to Puerto Rico two weeks before principal photography began, just for training purposes, which was great. Another respect

is we bonded as a cast and the only way this movie truly works is because of the chemistry.”

“We got that from fight training,” he adds, “We fell in love with each other while beating the crap out of each other, it was pretty cool. And Zoë [Saldana] did everything. We all want to do movies with Zoë, don’t we? We get to sit down in that movie theater and see it for the first time,” We’re really happy to see all that hard work up on the screen. It’s cool when you see these fight sequences and I remember very well Roque (Idris Elba’s character) punching me and Zoë kicking me in the head and that’s there on the screen, we’ll be able to look at that forever. It’s a good deal.”

Jeffrey said that he received the greatest validation of their approach to original material when The Losers premiered to thousands of enthusiastic fanboys at both Comic-Con and Wondercon.

“We went to Wondercon last weekend and showed, I don’t know, about four minutes of footage,” he recounts, “So I think at that point, no one had seen the film, no press had seen it. Idris still hasn’t seen the movie. They love Zoë. I will say this. At Wondercon, I never seen a reception like the one she got. The women, it’s like a 10 to 1 ratio. The house almost exploded when Zoë came out. From what we are gathering from not only Wondercon, but in the last couple of days, people are really responding to this movie, more than we could have hoped for.”

“All you can hope for is positive reaction for the work that you do,” Morgan continues, “I mean, we all go into these projects thinking for it to be great and that’s our goal. Whether or not that happens, once it goes through the editing process, we don’t have control over that and we don’t know what the hell’s

going to happen. So, having seen this, I saw a rough cut of it at least, I was really proud of this. This was exactly the movie we wanted to make. We made it for as much, the Wondercon people, as we did for…this movie could be seen by anybody. It’s not Thor, it’s not Watchmen, there was a little bit of a chance to have more fun with this and do a Lethal Weapon type of vibe. It’s really going to back to when Joel Silver became Joel Silver doing. The Wondercon audience, the Comic-Con audience were very happy with and I think it plays beyond that.”