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.
“Let’s walk up to it and not have a justified reason to pull,” Mr. Olyphant explained. “The thinking was, let’s make it difficult for Raylan to not kill him, and see if he could do the right thing.”
He did, and all went their separate ways in an episode that, true to form, also included more violent showdowns and plenty of other fireworks, metaphorical and literal (at one point Boyd flung actual dynamite at his pursuers). Other fan favorites like Jere Burns’s cagey schemer Wynn Duffy apparently made it out alive, too, though Raylan’s signature Stetson didn’t (more on that below).
In separate phone interviews, Mr. Olyphant and Mr. Goggins discussed what they’ll miss about “Justified” and why it was time to end the show. Edited excerpts from the conversations are below.
Did you keep the hat?
OLYPHANT: No.
It seems like a natural memento.
OLYPHANT: What am I gonna do with it?
Put it in your den or something?
OLYPHANT: I’ll tell you what I did do: I kept the other hat. [In the finale, Raylan kills a hired gun and takes his hat.] I had that one made for me. I’ve always said let’s kill the hat before we kill Raylan, you know? Elmore never liked the hat. Let’s put a bullet in the hat. Then I thought, I should get another hat, one that I didn’t wear for six years. So then I get a free hat out of the show.
You’re wearing it right now, aren’t you?
OLYPHANT: [Laughs.] I wear it everywhere. It’s awesome. It’s got a matchstick in it. It’s a good-looking hat.
When did you know how the show was going to end?
OLYPHANT: I was in the room before we started shooting this season and we talked about the ending on Day 1. The big question we asked right off the bat was, are we going to kill anyone?
GOGGINS: I wanted to die. I really, really wanted to die. It would have been easier for me, as an actor, just to lay him down and not think about it. But at the beginning of the season, Graham sat me down with the other producers and said, “What if nobody dies?” I went home and I really thought about it and I went, “O.K. I think he’s right.” Selfishly, I don’t want to see Boyd die and maybe the audience didn’t want to see him die. I’m very, very happy with how it ends.
There was that final scene in the prison where Raylan and Boyd did seem to arrive at some sort of mutual understanding. What was that like to shoot?
GOGGINS: It was my last day and it really snuck up on me, the exchange between those two people. We read it on the page and when we stepped in to do it, it became something completely different. It was very, very cathartic for me, as Boyd, and I think it was for Tim. Boyd needed him to acknowledge that he did love Ava, that that was real, and that their friendship was more than the adversarial dynamic that they had been living in for the last three seasons. That their prior friendship and their mutual struggles amounted to something more than just anger. That was summed up in the phrase, “We dug coal together.” I was elated and somehow released from this burden for Boyd after that scene, and I just cried like a baby and just hugged Tim, and hugged and thanked all those incredible people. It’s there one minute and then it’s over.
Were there any other emotional moments toward the end?
OLYPHANT: I had one more setup left, and the gravity of the moment definitely snuck up on me. The last scene I shot, ironically enough, was a scene with David Koechner in the Miami marshals office. So when I say the gravity of the situation snuck up, it definitely snuck up because it was Koechner, who cares? [Laughs.]
Why was it so important to bring things back to the core three characters: Ava, Raylan and Boyd?
OLYPHANT: At the risk of sounding sarcastic, because they were still around. What else was it gonna be about? When it was clear that Boyd and Ava were in it for the long haul, I didn’t see any other reason why it shouldn’t be about those three.
GOGGINS: So much of it is keeping in the tone of Elmore Leonard. In his short story it came down to those three people sitting around a table. Ava is where Boyd and Raylan intersect in the most intimate way. People who watch this show want to know how that trio ends, where they intersect and where they go from there.
You’ve had some time to get used to not doing the show. How do you feel about the fact that its over?
GOGGINS: I thought I was better prepared for it, having been through the process with “The Shield,” but it was very different. But it’s time. I said everything I needed to say as Boyd Crowder. I don’t know where the story for Raylan Givens goes, but for me, it was time to step out from underneath the weight of this guy and love him from a distance for a while.
OLYPHANT: Now is not the time to ask me because this time, every season, it’s like thank God, it’s nice to take a breath. Talk to me in six months when it’s supposed to be time to go back to work. But there’s very little doubt in my mind that we got off the air when we should have, or at least in that setup with those people. Because I’m going to put an asterisk by it: If someone calls me a couple years from now and asks me if I want to do another Raylan, I bet the answer would be yes. There’s a follow-up question, which is for how much? [Laughs.]
So would this theoretical new Raylan show be set in Miami?
OLYPHANT: You’re thinking too small. U.S. marshals are federal; they can go anywhere. I’ve been pitching this for six years now — I kept saying, “You know, Raylan could go to Paris.” They’re like, “Hey this year Ava’s going to run,” and I was like, “Great, to … Paris?” And they said, “No, just up the hill.” Look, it would be a lot of fun to do some sort of whatever they call it these days — limited series, mini-series. I’d gladly take the gig.
After some time passes, what do you think you’re going to remember about working on this show?
GOGGINS: I’ll miss buttoning my shirt all the way to the top. [Laughs.] It’s rare that you get the kind of chemistry that I had with Tim, that Boyd has with Raylan, and that’s going be a big hole in my life. Speaking the way Boyd speaks, his life philosophy, as complicated and nuanced and as enigmatic as it is — it’s going to be a big loss.
We keep hearing about the Golden Age of television, and “Justified” was on alongside all these other well-regarded shows. Where do you think it fit in among the other great series of the era? What will its legacy be?
GOGGINS: I think it will age well. What people have loved about it is, there are no rules or definable walls that hold “Justified.” It’s absurd, it’s out-and-out funny, and it’s dark and violent. It’s emotional at times — I feel like Boyd’s story line really added that element to it. It has something for anyone who chooses to pick it up in the future.
OLYPHANT: I have no clue. I can tell you the thing I’m proud of: There were times, when the show really hit its stride, I remember thinking, “Well, this is as good as it gets.” I haven’t seen many of these other shows, but there’s no way they’re that much better than what I saw here. When I’m doing that scene in the pilot with Dewey and Ava at the doorstep, that whole sequence, that’s just good writing. And I’m watching Damon (Herriman, who played Dewey Crowe], and that’s good acting. And when I’m in the scene in the church with Walt in the pilot, I’m like this guy is great. And I remember thinking that when I was working with Margo Martindale. And I remember doing a scene with Jere Burns in the Winnebago, when Raylan’s playing Harlan roulette with him, and I’m like, you know, there’s no naked girls in this scene but otherwise this is pretty much everything you’ve ever asked for in entertainment. So where does it stack up at the end of the day? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. I can only tell you that I’m quite confident that when the show was good, it was really good.