Norman Reedus in ‘Ride With Norman Reedus’ (AMC)



Okay, if you’re one of the truly die-hard Norman Reedus fans, the ones who spend a good portion of their days plotting just how to get the chance to meet and lick the man so cool that The Walking Dead powers that be created a character just for him, you may be familiar with many of the following facts.



But for those who less obsessively appreciate his talents (not that we’re judging), read on for some fresh deets on the star of AMC’s charming new road trip reality series Ride with Norman Reedus, premiering Sunday.

1. His favorite episode of The Walking Dead is Season 4’s “Still,” a.k.a. the one where Daryl and Beth drink moonshine and bond after running away from the prison together following The Governor’s attack.

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Reedus and Emily Kinney in ‘The Walking Dead’ (Gene Page/AMC)

2. Reedus’s parents weren’t together while he and his younger sister Leslie were growing up, and his businessman father was rarely in his life when he was a child. But the two reconciled before his father died in 2002 — he has “Norman” tattooed on his chest in honor of his dad, Norman Sr. — and Reedus told EW.com that he used the memory of his father’s death to evoke Daryl’s emotional response to brother Merle’s death in Season 3’s “This Sorrowful Life” episode of TWD.



3. His mother, Marianne, was once a Playboy Bunny, who also taught kindergarten, high school, and ran an orphanage and school in Kurdistan. She’s also a Carol-and-Daryl shipper who, Reedus says, thinks actress Melissa McBride would make a nice real-life match for her son.



4. Fans of The Walking Dead present Reedus with so many Daryl-related gifts that he dedicates three rooms in his New York City apartment to collecting some of his favorite keepsakes. Among the most unusual items he’s been given: a breast implant, which he uses as a cell phone holder in his TWD trailer, and a bag of, well, he explains it best. “One girl handed me a bag of meat… it was sort of in this yellow oil, and she said it was squirrel,” Reedus told the Los Angeles Times. “She goes, ‘I hunted it down with a shovel.’ That was pretty weird."



5. He’s also a photographer and artist, and says he once sculpted a very anatomically detailed vagina out of pieces of a busted up rock.



6. Reedus was nearly killed in a 2005 accident in Berlin, when a car that was taking him back to his hotel after an REM concert was hit by a semi-truck. He spent four months in a Berlin hospital recuperating — and now sports a titanium eye socket as a result — but got so bored during his recovery that he agreed to leave the hospital to star in a friend’s short film, Meet Me in Berlin, about a man who misses a planned date with a woman because he gets into a car accident, in Berlin.



7. Reedus’s first TV role was a guest stint on Charmed, where he played Nate Parks, the boyfriend of Rose McGowan’s Paige… until she found out he was a married man and father of two.



8. He got his Screen Actors Guild card with the 1997 Guillermo del Toro sci-fi/horror flick Mimic, in which he gets eaten by a cockroach.



9. He dropped out of high school to move to Tokyo, then London, then Spain (where he supported himself by selling paintings of stray cats), then he followed a girlfriend to Los Angeles, where he would be “discovered” as an actor after being fired from his job at a motorcycle shop called Dr. Carl’s Hog Hospital. While drunk at a party with a friend, a producer asked him if he wanted to be in a play. The production, called Maps for Drowners, also starred a pre-Friends Lisa Kudrow. P.S. The girlfriend he followed to L.A. broke up with him to marry someone else.



10. He later modeled for Prada… in a tuxedo. Explaining his surprise at being asked to model for the company, he told an interviewer, “I mean, I’m short and fat and drink beer.”