The eye-patch wearing Governor stands out as the villain everyone loved to hate on AMC’s hit zombie series, “The Walking Dead— but during a trip to Greece, the actor who played him became well-loved, by hundreds of refugees he helped.

David Morrissey headed to Greece to help locals deal with the refugee crisis, that has seen more than a thousand refugees arriving a week to Greece’s frontier islands.

“The problem is just escalating so quickly,” Morrissey told NBC News after a trip to the Greek island of Lesvos with the United Nations’ Refugee Agency.

“As a father yourself, you do carry that with you everywhere,” he said. “I was rescuing people, you know, helping the coast guard to get people out of boats, and they were there with their young babies, and that really puts it in perspective.”

About 60 percent of the refugees arriving to Greece come from war-torn Syria.

“We’ve seen the photographs of what’s happening in Syria,” he said. “We have to respond to this collectively and wake up to this responsibility.”

Video from NBC News: