Interview
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Timothy Olyphant on Becoming a Self-Absorbed Country Star Onstage
Timothy Olyphant tells Rolling Stone what brought him back to the New York stage after two decades, why he doesn’t play the part for laughs and what it’s like stripping down in front of a live audience eight nights a week.
You hadn’t done theater in a while, why did you go back to the stage?
First and foremost: Kenny and Neil. As soon as the opportunity came up and I saw those two guys’ names, I knew immediately I was gonna want to do it. I don’t think I finished the first scene and I told my wife, “I’m gonna want to do this.” She told me to finish the fuckin’ play and, and I said, “I don’t have that much time!”What was it about Kenneth Lonergan in particular?
I’ve been a huge fan of Kenny’s work from the jump. There’s very few things that have come along and I thought, “I wished I could have done that.” But the thing that still jumps to mind is, I remember auditioning for You Can Count on Me 20 years ago (and not getting the part). It was such a beautiful piece, though. So when this came around, it had a ton of appeal. Plus, I lived here in New York back in the Nineties, so the opportunity to return has always been on the mind. Just to figure out how to pull it off and what was worth trying to pull it off for. I had done a play at the Atlantic and lived in this neighborhood, so if I could work this out, it seemed like a shitload of fun.I’m also ignoring the obvious: It’s very rare that a piece of material comes along that is both a sweet little fit and scares the shit out of you at the same time. That’s a really fun place to work from.
I re-read an interview you did with us in which you said Raylan, your character in Justified, is an asshole, so I wondered: Is Strings a good guy or is he an asshole in a different way?
Listen, you can’t believe everything you read [Laughs]. It sounds fairly credible. Is this guy an asshole? I haven’t thought of it that way. I think this guy is desperately trying to turn his life around in a very sincere way. He’s in crisis, his life is a fraud, he’s trying to get out of it — and it ain’t easy. I think he means everything he says, for the entirety of the play. At the moment, it’s an absolutely sincere thought — which is part of his problem.We never get to hear you play or sing much, who would you model Strings after musically?
I don’t know; I don’t get more than a few syllables out. They don’t let me. Maybe I could pull off some sort of Johnny Cash-Leonard Cohen kinda vibe there. I don’t know, we sort of went for some old-school thing. I think my vocal range is so limited it wouldn’t let me commit.Read more at rollingstone.com
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Video: Timothy takes the stage in ‘Hold On to Me Darling’
Source: pix11.com
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Q. and A.: Timothy Olyphant
By KATHRYN SHATTUCK / Source: nytimes.com
Countless words have been spilled on the subject of Timothy Olyphant and the Stare: that faint narrowing of those fathomless eyes, shorthand that one of his gunslinging lawmen — say, Raylan Givens of “Justified” or Seth Bullock of “Deadwood” — is about to blow a bad guy to smithereens.
Or, in real life, that an interview is headed south.
On a recent evening, Mr. Olyphant, 47, slid into a chair after a long day of rehearsing Kenneth Lonergan’s new play, “Hold on to Me Darling,” now in previews at the Atlantic Theater Company. Mr. Olyphant, a California boy without a western bone in his body, has played a lot of cowboy types. Here he’s Strings McCrane, a country-music and movie star on a downward spiral in what he called “a beast of a play, at first glance absurdly funny but operating on a very deep, very insightful level about human behavior.”
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Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins Look Back on ‘Justified’
Source: nytimes.com
The gun thugs were plentiful. The body count might have exceeded the total population of Harlan County, Ky. But in the end, “Justified” went out on a surprisingly compassionate note.
Over six seasons the darkly comic FX crime drama, created by Graham Yost, served up an array of colorful “big bads” to menace Timothy Olyphant’s swaggering United States marshal Raylan Givens, including Margo Martindale’s Emmy-winning crime queen in Season 2, Neal McDonough’s sleeve-gun wielding nutter in Season 3 and Sam Elliott’s dope kingpin this year.
The final season, however, mostly amounted to a three-way showdown between the core characters — Raylan, his hometown nemesis, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) and their shared love interest, Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter). The finale put them all in a room together one last time, as Boyd and Raylan squared off in a callback to the series’s inciting incident — Givens’s “justified” shooting of a criminal in Miami that nevertheless resulted in him being re-assigned to his home state, Kentucky.
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Videos: Timothy on Conan
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Videos: Timothy on the carpet at the Paley Center
Source: TV Goodness
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Timothy on ‘Scream 2’ and Saying Goodbye to ‘Justified’
Via variety.com
After six seasons, Timothy Olyphant is wrapping his Emmy-nominated run as lawman Raylan Givens on FX’s hit series “Justified.” But he was on the other side of the law (20-year-old spoiler alert) when he was cast in director Wes Craven’s “Scream 2.” “I appreciate the trip down memory lane,” he said of revisiting his first Variety mention.
How did you land the role in “Scream 2”?
I auditioned — multiple times. Why wouldn’t I want to be in “Scream”? I wanted to be in the first one.
What was the mood like on set?
It was quite a buzz being on a set like that. One could make a good argument that Wes was one of the best directors I’ve ever worked for. Not a bad way to get started early.
What would you do differently if you could go back to that time?
That’s a long list. I stepped in it many times back then. I was just a fool. There were plenty of apologies at that stage of my career, I’m sure.
You’ve had some memorable roles. Which have been your favorites?
That “Scream” role was quite a gift. I had virtually nothing on my resume at that point. I’m sure some of it was made up. That was a leap of faith they all took. I’m very appreciative of them being willing to take that risk.
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Timothy Olyphant on CONAN
Timothy is grateful that “Justified” had such a great cast, with one glaring exception.
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Video: The Ellen Show
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Marshal Law: Timothy Olyphant on Ending ‘Justified’
Source: rollingstone.com
“Six seasons and a movie? Is that a thing?” asks Timothy Olyphant, and if you listen closely, you can hear the slightest trace of a Southern drawl on that last word. “Man, I wouldn’t even know how that would work. But I do like the sound of it.” The 46-year-old actor was born in Honolulu, raised in Northern California’s Central Valley and went to college at USC in Los Angeles; it’s the voice of a certain laconic lawman from Kentucky, however, that seems to keep making cameos over the phone line.
For five seasons, Olyphant’s Raylan Givens, the U.S. Marshal at the center of FX’s Justified, has used his lightning-fast draw, his John Wayne-like strut and a certain down-home cockiness to take on white supremacists, corrupt cops, moonshiners, the Dixie mafia and the cunning backwoods con man Boyd Crowder (memorably played by The Shield’s Walton Goggins). At this point, the rangy TV star has contributed as much to the DNA of the character as Elmore Leonard, the famously prolific author who created Givens in 1993 (he appears in the book Pronto) and whose 2001 novella Fire in the Hole formed the overall basis for the series. Now, as the show begins its sixth and final season tomorrow night at 10pm EST, Olyphant is preparing his long goodbye to Raylan. And despite the fact that, as a co-executive producer, he had a hand in pulling the plug on the popular crime drama and claims that he “doesn’t particularly like” the character, the actor is still having a hard time letting go. “I honestly don’t know whose dumb idea it was to end this show,” he jokes. “He should be fucking fired.”
Olyphant took a break from filming the final round of Justified episodes to talk briefly about wrapping things up, getting to know Leonard before the writer’s passing in 2013 and why someone needs to cast Emmy-winner Margo Martindale as a supervillain as soon as possible.
What prompted you and [showrunner] Graham Yost to end the show after six seasons?
It was just a mutual decision to go out now…it seemed like the right time. Although we’re coming down to shooting the final four episodes now, and I’m having a lot of fun. I can’t imagine that I did something as stupid as saying we should stop [laughs].So are you going to miss Raylan?
I know what you mean by that question, but…no. I mean, I realize this was a great part to play, and I’ll miss working with these guys a lot. But I had some problems with Raylan. I’m not so sure he’s a great guy.Really? He’s got some baggage, certainly — and he does shoot someone in cold blood in the very first scene of the series…
Yeah, exactly! And the way he presents this situation, Raylan makes it seem on the up and up: “I don’t know what the trouble is here. He had a gun. There was no way he wasn’t gonna have a gun. He wouldn’t have been there if he didn’t want to shoot me. I did warn him.” There’s also a sense that this is no big deal for him, you know…”Why is everyone getting their panties in a bunch about this? The guy was a criminal.” I’ve thought long and hard about this, and that’s not how you want law-enforcement officers to behave. I think people would have thought it was just God-awful and be troubled and offended by it, but people seem to love him. They think he’s awesome.Why do you think people love him so much? The sort of old-fashioned “yes, ma’am” attitude? The whole Western-hero throwback thing?
Maybe all that. Mostly because he’s just a good, well-written character, which is more because of Elmore Leonard than me. When people tell me they like Raylan, I just say “thank you very much.” I honestly do appreciate the compliment. Just because I think he’s kind of an asshole doesn’t mean they have to think that too [laughs].What sort of feedback have you had from actual U.S. marshals?
When I started visiting a bunch of U.S. Marshals before the show started in order to get a feel of how a marshal carries themselves, what a regular work day is like for them, etc., I noticed one thing: Every one of their offices had a poster of The Fugitive up on the wall. Every single one. It’s The Fugitive and old Westerns — they love those movies. The last time I was in a Marshals’ office, they had a poster of Justified up. I asked them, “Did you know I was coming by, so you put up a poster of the show?” And they said, “Oh, we all love it…you guys make us look good.” I thought, this is great. If they like, we really did something here. [Pause] Keep in mind I am the star of the show, so people have a tendency to be very polite to me. [Laughs]You got to know Leonard fairly well before he passed away, right? Do you feel like spending a lot of time with him helped you get a sense of who Raylan was?
All the good things about Raylan — they came directly from Elmore. You mentioned the old-fashioned manners and the stoic hero thing, but the thing about Raylan that people really responded to, if I had to guess, was that he seemed effortlessly cool. And that’s Elmore Leonard to a tee. The guy was genuinely cool. It was never a pose with him. You can go into any party or public gathering, and you’ll see lots of people trying to act cool, and then there’s always one person off in the corner, not doing much, who’s the real deal. That was Elmore.
Read the full interview here: http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/timothy-olyphant-end-of-justified-20150119#ixzz3PJUGGpnw