Timothy Olyphant, Cobb Vanth in the Mandoverse, talks to Collider’s Carly Lane about his career so far, winding through Deadwood tales and Alien: Earth musings.
Note: the interview contains spoilers for the Alien: Earth finale.
It doesn’t matter if he’s shared some variation of the same elsewhere before this; if you’ve been gifted the chance to talk with Olyphant at length, like I have for his latest role in Alien: Earth, you know better than to interrupt. Throughout all that we’ve spoken about so far — with Noah Hawley’s smash-hit FX series chief among them — one thing that becomes immediately apparent is that the 57-year-old actor will reach the point he’s ultimately trying to make, even if he takes the scenic route in getting there. Right now, Olyphant’s reminding me about Deadwood and the late Ralph Richeson, a background extra whom series creator Milch tapped for a bigger role — and who would go on to appear in 20 of the HBO Western’s 36 episodes as Richardson, the Grand Central Hotel’s eccentric chef who had a unique fixation with deer antlers.
The latter wouldn’t have even appeared on-screen, Olyphant adds, if Milch hadn’t plucked them out of a basket on set and told Richeson to act as though “they had divine powers.” That direction lent itself to a subtle throughline for a recurring character that perhaps even the most diehard Deadwood fans haven’t picked up on in the years since the original series’ conclusion, but the seeds were sown early on.
And herein lies the point of that Milch story: Hawley is someone whom the actor compares to Deadwood’s creator dropping those narrative breadcrumbs, only to pay them off weeks later. Take a particular scene in Alien: Earth Episode 4 between Olyphant’s stoic synthetic, Kirsh, and Adarsh Gourav’s Slightly, a hybrid with a young human’s consciousness placed into a synth’s body. Kirsh, after noticing Slightly’s wall adornment of the Japanese three wise monkeys, pauses to wax philosophical about the true meaning of something that’s been in the background of multiple scenes before this moment.
Olyphant confesses that he’d almost prefer not to know which came first: the set decoration, or the monkey monologue Hawley wrote for him. “He set it up pretty freaking early,” the actor adds, before leaning forward, eyebrows quirked, and following up his winding Milch detour with a punchline that has both of us laughing: “Point being? That guy’s thinking.”
Although Olyphant has a lot of admiration for writers who embrace the long game, both the setup and the payoff, he’s aware that his current path was laid courtesy of a much more spontaneous decision early on.
“My whole career is based on a big giant left turn,” he muses, sunglasses perched on top of his head and Corona in hand as he relaxes on the back deck of his Los Angeles home on the eve of Alien: Earth’s August 12 premiere. It’s an effortlessly relaxed, undeniably cool air that sets the tone early on for our entire conversation, even though we’re talking through a screen. “I mean, I was an art major,” he says. “I was painting ceramics!” As he’s revealed in previous interviews, the mere thought of acting was mortifying, so getting his fine arts degree at USC, where he was also recruited to swim for the Trojans, seemed like a perfect fit at the time. Yet there was always a part of him that felt an inexplicable pull towards acting. If nothing else, this was something he could try on for size to see if it fit.
“I figured I’d give it a shot, just to try to avoid a midlife crisis,” Olyphant jests. He’s immediate in crediting his wife, Alexis, with pointing out the glaringly obvious while he was wrestling with the idea of pursuing this pipe dream. “[She] said, ‘You’ve never mentioned this before, and you’ve never done it, so why would you think you could?’” Without even one school play credit to his name, Olyphant and his wife moved to New York, where he went through a two-year acting program at the William Esper Studio.
A string of small roles followed — his movie debut in 1996’s The First Wives Club, paid gigs in television pilots, one-off parts that didn’t amount to a recurring presence. Scream 2, a year later, was the job that Olyphant has since gone on to describe as a “gift,” despite playing one of the film’s two Ghostfaces, and it’s not difficult to see why. From that point on, the parts seemed to start rolling in, including one of Sex and the City’s most memorable guest-starring roles in its first season, the crime comedy film Go, the action flick Gone in 60 Seconds, and the rom-com The Girl Next Door. But it wasn’t until 2004, when Olyphant stepped out with a mustache and cowboy hat donned to play Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood, that audiences seemed to sit up and really take notice.
On the HBO series, Olyphant’s Bullock was positioned as a bulwark of sorts. Although he wore a literal black hat, he operated as the lawfully good sheriff of Deadwood, butting up against much less honorable characters, particularly Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen. While the two men are immediately positioned at odds due to Bullock’s honorable nature and Swearengen’s lean toward less-than-legal dealings, they forge a begrudging partnership over the course of Deadwood’s short-lived run. While the original show was canceled after three seasons, a majority of the cast returned for a feature-length continuation in 2019, titled Deadwood: The Movie. It was a reunion that proved bittersweet in light of Milch’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, which he publicly disclosed before beginning work on the film’s script. But it also enabled both the creator and the actors to bring the Deadwood story to a proper conclusion. For Olyphant, his career seems to be divided into two distinct periods: before Deadwood and after.
“David Milch is the gift that just keeps on giving. He has been like a little fucking man on my shoulder,” the actor declares, when I bring up his time on the HBO series, which included, among iconic onscreen moments, at least one significant creative pivot from Milch behind the scenes that resulted in the death of Bullock’s stepson, William, in Season 2. It’s an anecdote that Olyphant himself has told more than once in interviews, and when I reference it again now, he smiles as if there’s either an inside joke that exists between the two of us or he’s preparing to let me in on a new one. But it’s his relationship with Milch, he adds, that has informed his approach to acting now — an openness to spontaneity, and the great art that can result from still making those sudden left turns.
“Ever since I walked on that set, and maybe even more so after I walked off that set… what I watched and observed daily was a man who had done so much homework and was so well-versed in the world and the history and what his intentions were, and yet was so willing to throw it all out the window based on something he saw right in front of him,” Olyphant says. “I think anyone who is a fan of great drama, great writers, great painters, you see that. That’s 10, 20, 30, 40 years of experience meets a willingness to just say ‘Fuck it.’ It’s a beautiful thing to watch — and I feel like, to some degree, I’ve probably been chasing that ever since.”
On the heels of his star-making turns in both Deadwood and FX’s Justified, one might almost be tempted to ask whether Olyphant has been concerned about being typecast as the seemingly laidback lawman who happens to be as quick with words as he is on the draw — or even simply perceived by audiences that way. The past several years have seen him inhabiting a very specific type of character on television. There was the space marshal in Star Wars’ galaxy far, far away, plus the U.S. Marshal in Season 4 of Hawley’s anthology series set in the world of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, as well as his return to the role of Raylan Givens for 2023’s Justified: City Primeval miniseries. We’ve been circling back to the topic of career reinvention again and again, so now seems like the right time to ask: what was it about the idea of joining an Alien TV show, of all things, that put Olyphant’s head on a swivel?
“Just two words,” he reveals. “Noah Hawley.” Development on the FX series had been long-gestating, with the initial announcement coming as early as 2019, but it wasn’t until Olyphant got a call directly from Hawley that he let himself grin about the potential of playing in the Alien universe — but this far into his career, he’s also very familiar with guarding himself against too much hope on the off-chance an opportunity doesn’t move forward. “I’ve gotten pretty good at taking a peek and saying, ‘Even if this doesn’t end up being a thing, that phone call, that conversation means a great deal to me.’”
Read the interview in full here.
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