The high school coach in that movie was played by Ray McKinnon, who played Reverend Smith- he minister with a brain tumor from season one of Deadwood.
William Sanderson is a semi-regular on True Blood.
I am not liking Kim Dickens as Joanie Stubbs so far. She seems to have no range, her voice and facial expressions never seem to match her words, nor the mood of the situation. She seems like a black hole of emotion that sucks intensity out of the scene. This is the only character I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed.
I think I would agree with this - she’s one of the weaker links.
I would also nominate Alma Garrett (Molly Parker). Maybe it’s because she was drugged out for a lot of it, but she never really sold me on her character, nor did she seem to match the intensity of the men (or women) around her.
Also, quite frankly, I never really felt like Olyphant held up when face to face with Ian McShane.
The thing to remember about the Joanie Stubbs character is that she was a sexual abuse victim, in the days when there was no CPS, no counseling, no shelters. Her daddy used her and then sold her to Cy, where she set about helping to make victims of other women. Her flat effect (affect?) is appropriate. She was dead inside.
Gerald McRaney as Hearst was outstanding and he held his own in his scenes with McShane.
I can’t complain about any of them. If there were failings, I’d lay it to Milch’s directing.
I’d say Timothy Olyphant was far and away the weakest link acting-wise on Deadwood, though to be fair (and to flip a phrase) that’s praising with faint damning.
Johnny wasn’t a major player but was in most episodes. You of course remember that Al had his main right-hand man Dan Dorrity. Johnny was Al’s other henchman, below Dan. Kind of short and skinny and a little slow. He was there from the beginning to the end, always one of Al’s most loyal (if not trusted with info due to being slow) guys.
He’s great in Perfect Getaway, though. Have you seen it?
Not yet but I can’t wait. Ditto with The Crazies.
On one of the commentaries, Timothy Olyphant and Ian McShane are together, and Olyphant good-naturedly pokes fun at the other actors doing commentaries and laughs that they’re probably talking about acting and their Process and other deep things, but he and McShane are more “point and shoot” type actors who don’t go in for all of that.
And I thought to myself, if that’s true, if both of those two men are using the same methodology when they act…well, one of them is much better at it than the other.
Bullock is a much more stoic, restrained, internalizing character than Swearengen, for sure, but so much of the time Olyphant’s delivery was nothing more than wooden. When he was on, he was great, but I think he could have done a whole lot more with the role than what he did.
I saw a Paley Center interview with the cast where he said the same thing. John Hawkes (Sol Star on the show) talked about how he slept in a tent and cooked over a fire the night before he began shooting to get into character, and how being something of a Luddite he doesn’t even own a computer and likes to live with his electricity off when possible to stop from being distracted from the character while filming. Olyphant kind of scoffs and says “I memorize my lines, play Nintendo with my kids and go”. Uh, yeah, and yet there’s so little difference in your acting- other than Hawkes acts and you recite the lines in a monotone. (He came across as a world class ass on the show and I got that the others don’t particularly like him either.)
Robin Weigert was, not surprisingly, the most unrecognizable when not in character- very Renee Zellweggerish (though that even comes through as CJ). The actress who plays Bulloch’s wife is also very lovely and bubbly on the show.
Jeffrey Jones, who was on the show but wasn’t interviewed (was in the audience) has only had one appearance since Deadwood and that in a low budget “homeboys v. snobs” movie called Who’s Your Caddy? (he was one of the snobs). For those not familiar, Jones has had a rough few years- totally brought on himself- due to taking nude pics of a WAY underage boy (about 14 IIRC); it’s surprising that the producers of Deadwood didn’t fire him as most shows probably would have.
I can believe it.
It’s unfair of me to compare actresses based on the only two performances I’ve seen them in, but I can’t help but compare Anna Gunn with January Jones. I’ve seen Gunn in Deadwood and Breaking Bad, and Jones in Mad Men and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. They play unhappy wives in those roles, but Gunn manages to make Martha Bullock and Skyler White very different characters. Jones was exactly the same whether she was Betty Draper or that border guard’s wife. And she was awful in her SNL guest appearance, and Gunn was a hoot in a brief appearance awhile back on The Soup.
One of the great bonus features on the DVDs is of Welliver’s impersonations of various famous actors- DeNiro, Walken, Pacino [and possibly others- I think there’s someone else] auditioning for the role of Swearengen.
There’s apparently no love lost twixt McShane and Milch and Milch has actually said that if Ed O’Neill- his original choice for Swearengen- had worked out the show would have been better. O’Neill’s a good actor and his interpretation would definitely have been different but I can’t imagine anyone topping McShane’s in a villain you love to hate and hate to like. (O’Neill was too fresh off/possibly typecast from Married With Children for the producers to like plus he wanted a lot of money [more than McShane probably] and after a long run on Married and a ‘meh’ run with Dragnet he wasn’t really chomping at the bit to commit to a series again at the time.)
I did, and I thought he really enlivened an otherwise fairly mediocre movie. He made his character much more interesting and engaging than he had to, and caused the audience to actually feel a much more emotional investment in the ending than what should have rightfully been expected. I wanted to see another movie just about that couple (Olyphant and his girlfriend).
Timothy Omundson has a friendly competition with Dulé Hill over who can bring the most guest stars on Psych. He brings in people from Deadwood mainly, and Dulé Hill brings people from West Wing.
I’ve heard this more than once. Could you point me to a source that says why?
If that’s the case, then Omundson must have been the one responsible for Lucy Lawless showing up since he was Eli on Xena.
Sorry to be a noob reviving a dormant thread, but may I ask where you saw the Paley Center discussion? I attended that event in March 2005, but never saw that it was ever put out on DVD or otherwise available.
I hosted the original Deadwood Transcripts site, and started the Save Deadwood campaign (not to be confused with all the other “Save XXXXX” campaigns, lol) and web site (until the last hope was snuffed out). The transcripts are now hosted by the woman who actually did the grunt work of compiling them.
I have some pics and video of a couple of panel discussions during the cast trip to Deadwood, SD in June, 2005; if anybody’s interested, I can probably find someplace to post them. We thought it would be an annual event, heh.
BTW, Deadwood represented a comeback for Jeffrey Jones; he had done his time and was “clean,” so to speak, when hired and appearing on Deadwood, although I understand he got busted again not too long ago.
Thanks…
It’s on a DVD extras disk for the Complete Series boxed set. The same disk also has Welliver’s impressions and a long interview with David Milch who mostly talks about his own brilliance but gives some interesting tidbits that were planned for the 4th season (such as bringing the ubiquitous but always good Zeljko Ivanek onto the show as John D. Rockefeller’s long lost father, a real life character who’d abandoned his family 30 years before and was, literally, a snake oil salesman in Deadwood and other parts of the west in the 1870s, and a grand con involving the actors who took up so much of the plotline in the 3rd season that went nowhere because it was all set up for the fourth).
On the “where are they now?” point, the Ian McShane series KINGS is one of those “how in the hell did they ever sell that idea?” mysteries. It actually had its moments, but… for those not familiar it was a modern day alterniverse retelling of the story of King David with McShane as the Saul character. It could have possibly been a brilliant miniseries, but the story of King David spans about 60 years in the Bible and it was filmed in pretty much a 1 episode=a few weeks at most timing; by the time you got to the deaths of Saul and Jonathan (maybe 1/3 through King David’s story in the Bible) it would have lasted years and by the time you got to Absalom and Bathsheba and other of David’s midlife crises it would have taken 10 or 20 years at the rate they were going.
Ah yes, the final boxed set, forgot about that and never bought it.
Yeah, I had heard that Welliver’s impressions were great. I may have to see if I can find a used set.
Thanks…
I’d read of the McShane-Milch “no love lost” connection, but the closest the bonus materials come to addressing it is when Milch discusses his original vision for Al Swearengen (who was to have been played by Ed O’Neill until that fell through). Milch said his original intent was for Swearengen to be as complete a bastard on the series as he was in real life, basically total amorality and viciousness. You can see this in the early episodes when Al is a woman battering murdering thug, but while he never transforms into a loveable curmudgeon with a secret heart of gold the character does become less psychopathic and and even downright noble (within a defined context) on a couple of occasions later in the series, and Milch either credits this to or blames it on McShane.
Since practically nothing from Bullock or Star or any of the other characters on the show was taken from their real life counterparts (and I’m not complaining- I loved the show and didn’t see it as a history lesson), I’m not sure why the deviation of the Swearengen character was a sore point for Milch. While the real Swearengen may well have been a psycho with few if any redeeming qualities (we know he was a serial wife beater [i.e. married several women over the course of his life and was abusive to all of them] and murderer and extortionist among other things), a character who is just pure evil is boring to watch. Complexity is a lot more interesting, so if that was McShane over Milch then I think Ian made the right call; one of my favorite aspects of the show was learning things Al would and wouldn’t do, or the way he’d coldbloodedly cut the throat of a man purely to protect himself in one episode and very tenderly, almost kindly, smother the minister with brain cancer or show absolute contempt for Pinkertons offering him major money to frame Alma in another.
Yeah, I’m sure Milch saying he wanted to cast O’Neill didn’t earn him any love from McShane, I don’t recall exactly when that quote came out; it was possibly in the purgatory when John From Cincinnati was in production but the Deadwood movies weren’t officially dead yet.
And I know McShane mouthed off once or twice about the whole movies thing being a charade. Don’t know which came first.
Anyways, it’s one of those things where post-mortem, it’s impossible to see O’Neill in the role instead of McShane.
The only reason I watched Deadwood was that I had seen McShane in Sexy Beast and happened to catch an HBO promo and instantly recognized the voice. So I watched the first ep and was instantly hooked.
If it had been Ed O’Neill in that promo? 99.9% chance I never would have watched the show. Not a western (I know Milch says he originally was going to set it in Rome) or a big Milch fan before or after.