Rico's rants: Good man, good show

Jeremy Egner has an article in The New York Times about Timothy Olyphant in Justified (upper photo):

In the premiere of the new season of Justified, beginning on 17 January, a dashing psychopath makes a casual reference to this Kentucky crime drama’s signature prop, the Stetson worn by the protagonist, United States Marshal Raylan Givens. “Not much call for cowboys these days,” the thug says in a syrupy, menacing drawl. The lawman responds, “You would be surprised.”
The line is an in-joke, a reference to the baroque backwoods adventures that Raylan, a sort of twenty-first-century Gary Cooper with a dry wit, has endured during two acclaimed seasons of this FX drama. But the exchange also functions as a career appraisal for the man who plays him. Timothy Olyphant, 43, has worked steadily since the 1990s, but in this easygoing, volatile marshal he has found his defining role. Not that he’s willing to admit it.
“The bottom line is, someone gave me a television show and I figured I’d make the most of it,” he said during a recent visit to New York. “The words do all the work for you.”
Based on stories by Elmore Leonard, Justified captures his darkly funny, morally murky tone and spikes the traditional crime procedural with hooch and Oxycontin, tracking its hero’s attempts to thwart colorful drug dealers and gunrunners and negotiate his own fractured relationships. The series unspools in an oddly captivating alternate South peopled by whimsically twisted archetypes and marked by sudden shifts between folksy black comedy and graphic violence. (The thug in the premiere is known as Ice Pick.)
Last year the series won a Peabody Award, and its second season was among the most lauded of 2011, netting four Emmy nominations, including a first for Olyphant and a supporting actress win for Margo Martindale, who played a crime matriarch. Ratings for Season Two increased fifteen percent in total viewers, and an average of just under 2.2 million watch each new episode on Tuesday nights, an audience that grows to nearly 4 million each week when it includes DVR viewers, though they still lag behind those of FX dramas like Sons of Anarchy and American Horror Story. The challenge for the show’s producers is to build on the series’s momentum from last season and transform from critical favorite into critically acclaimed hit. “It’s coming off one of the best seasons any series put forth last year, and that’s a really tough act to follow,” said John Landgraf, the president of FX. “But when you have a virtually ideal central character and central performance, audiences are going to find it.”
As the face of the series, Olyphant has perhaps the most impact on whether the show will continue to succeed. By all accounts it’s a job he takes most seriously, playing an active role behind the scenes as well. Leonard himself calls the actor’s performance the best screen adaptation ever of a Leonard hero, a category that includes names like George Clooney and John Travolta. “He played Raylan exactly like I heard him when I was writing him,” said Leonard, an executive producer of the series. (Raylan, a new novel by Leonard about the character, comes out on 17 January as well.)
Olyphant expressed appreciation for that appraisal but inserted a note of pragmatism. “If George Clooney was starring right now in a big Elmore Leonard thing, I bet Elmore would be very complimentary of George as well,” he said, laughing.
An actor of rangy grace and wolfish good looks— his easy grin seems designed to induce swoons and suspicion in equal measure— Olyphant has carved out the career of a man Hollywood isn’t quite sure how to use. He has seesawed between charismatic criminals in films like Go and Live Free or Die Hard, and checkered heroes in projects like the FX legal thriller Damages and HBO’s Shakespearean western Deadwood. (Another 'hat' role, it was Olyphant’s most notable performance before Justified.)
“People just like him, and yet there is something a little dangerous there,” said Graham Yost, the creator of Justified. “So he gets the combination of the good-guy, bad-guy thing.”
Walton Goggins, who plays Boyd Crowder, Raylan’s longtime friend and nemesis, added, “Tim’s hat is never entirely white.”
Such shades of gray are right at home in the Kentucky of Justified. The same sharp-edged nonchalance that makes Olyphant something of a square peg in a conventional blockbuster is well suited for a place where smooth-talking cops and robbers trade both barbs and gunfire with something like affection. “In the world of Elmore Leonard, people are defined not by good and bad, but by whether you’re a jerk or not,” Olyphant said.
He expounded upon that world from a perch about as far removed from it as possible. At an airy ninth-floor restaurant in the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, he sipped a cappuccino as he looked out toward the bristly gray winter canopy of Central Park.
A laconic presence on Justified, Olyphant is affable in person and projects less a lawman's swagger than the ease of a former athlete; he swam competitively at the University of Southern California. His face is striking, if unconventional— all smooth, wide planes and chiseled edges. His hair is more brown than gray, but the gray is climbing from both sideburns. A wispy array of white whiskers curls around his chin like smoke.
“The camera does not hate the dude,” said Natalie Zea, who plays his ex-wife and current love interest on Justified.
Neither did the nearby patrons who sneaked glances over the rims of their coffee cups. Olyphant professed a delighted but measured attitude about the recognition that has come from Justified. “You see a bus drive by with your picture on it, and you think: ‘That’s cool, that’s new,’ ” he said. “I try to embrace all that comes with it and at the same time know that most of that stuff has nothing to do with me. It’s just part of the job.”
The museum was his idea. Olyphant majored in fine art at USC and was a frequent visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1990s, when he lived in New York with his wife of twenty years, Alexis. (They have three children.) Of his artistic output now, Olyphant grinned: “I can doodle with the best of them.”
It was a moment of wry, Raylanesque self-deprecation in a day spent mostly trying to convince a reporter that he was nothing like the character. But ask nearly anyone involved in Justified about Olyphant, and before long it comes out: the reason Olyphant works as Raylan is because, in various ways, he is Raylan. His colleagues point to his sharp sense of humor and casual verbosity, a gift of gab common to Leonard characters. (He also has a Leonardian flair for profanity, as exemplified by an unprintable reaction to an outré Korean art installation at the museum.)
Most often they mention a charged quality that Olyphant shares with the character, an understated intensity that animated previous projects like Deadwood but has “reached its sort of apotheosis in Raylan,” said Landgraf, who first proposed him for Justified. As David Milch, the creator of Deadwood, put it: “I think Tim is a guy that doesn’t let himself be known easily. It’s what allows him to continue to do such interesting work.”
Olyphant, who grew up in Modesto, California, began acting in New York in the mid-1990s with roles in short-lived television projects and brief appearances in movies like The First Wives Club. Larger roles followed. He was a killer in Scream 2, and a boy-toy in an episode of Sex and the City. As a sardonic drug dealer in Go, from 1999, a frenetic cult comedy about young night crawlers in Los Angeles, he showed off his comic chops with a caustic riff on The Family Circus.
“There have been roles that, had the movies been bigger, would have probably changed my life,” Olyphant said. “If Go had been a huge box office success, I would have had tons of opportunities, I imagine.” Instead, it was followed by mostly forgettable films, until Olyphant joined Deadwood in 2004 as the conflicted sheriff Seth Bullock, the simmering straight man to Ian McShane’s silver-tongued rogue. The role revealed in Olyphant a capacity for explosive, nuanced performance barely suggested by earlier roles. “He seemed to understand the contradictions in the character as well as his most fundamental purposes, and that’s a terrific mix,” Milch said.
But the show’s sudden end after three seasons cast him back into the wilderness of the working actor. The period that followed included some high-profile roles— he was a nefarious super-hacker in Live Free or Die Hard in 2007— but not much fulfillment. Olyphant finally reached a sort of breaking point during the shooting of a film he declined to identify, when, he said, he found himself in some Eastern European country doing risible junk. “And you think: ‘How did I end up here?’” (It’s perhaps worth noting that Hitman, a 2007 action film starring Olyphant that was based on a video game, was filmed largely in Bulgaria.) “You go from working with David Milch to just doing stuff to pay some bills,” he said. “You think, ‘There’s got to be a way to bring these two things together.’ ”
The answer, he decided, was to play a larger role in shaping the projects he acted in, beginning with Damages on FX. Justified brought his first producer credit.
“Often on shows that really doesn’t mean much,” Yost said. “On this show it actually doesn’t reflect the depth of his involvement, which would be an even bigger credit.”
Olyphant’s co-stars joke that he leaves no scene unturned during filming, constantly proposing new angles, and questioning whether a piece of action or dialogue is true to the show’s founding sensibility. He comes to the set on his off days to coach guest stars and admitted that anyone not willing to really dig into the material is “of absolutely no use to me.”
Goggins said: “Tim is the biggest reminder for everyone that we’re in the Elmore Leonard world. And that it needs to be funny and dark and twisted, and it needs to speak with all of those voices at the same time.”
Olyphant can be evangelical about Leonard’s stories, praising the specificity that breathes believability into gonzo characters and situations. But he predictably plays down his behind-the-scenes contributions to Justified, even as he allows that his own deep involvement has helped to reinvigorate a career that felt as if it had gone awry.
In that respect, the show has gotten Olyphant back on track toward the deceptively simple goal he set when he began acting nearly twenty years ago: “What I hoped is that it would be something I could do for a long time and would want to do for a long time,” he said. “So far, so good.”