Berg needed to quiz his cast before hiring them: “Are you in physical shape? Are your knees good? Are your ankles good? Is your back okay?” They were given a month of “cowboy camp,” learning to ride horses in three feet of snow. Still, one star, Taylor Kitsch, broke his foot by the second episode and was in a boot for six weeks. His colead, Betty Gilpin, still thinks about filming intense action scenes on horseback while in a corset for months on end. “Anytime one of the guys would start to complain about being uncomfortable in their costume, my hand would rise to their trachea,” she says. “I’m sure my liver is in my throat and my small intestine is in my ankle. Things have been rearranged in a way that will never go back together.”
Such visceral, violent realism helps set American Primeval, premiering January 9, apart. The show is inspired by real events, as the clashing ambitions and fears of different groups in the American West circa 1857 come to an explosive head. “It was a very lawless, wild spot in America,” Berg says.
Helming all six episodes of American Primeval, Berg settled on the Mountain Meadows Massacre as the series’ inciting tragedy. The first episode recreates the murder of hundreds of pioneers traveling from Missouri at the hands of Mormon soldiers, under orders from church president Brigham Young. This occurs as Indigenous nations including the Southern Paiutes of Utah and the Northwestern Shoshone fight for survival and security in the same territory the Mormons are encroaching on.
“We wanted to be really true to 1857, and paint a real picture of what it must have been like for a woman who was raised in a society that told her, ‘Okay, your job is to sit in a pretty dress and write a letter and then go to sleep, or wait for people to visit you and get married. And die reading a pearl-embossed Bible in a bubble,’” Gilpin says. “There’s a tendency to want to make female characters like Sara badass and fearless. I think that just does a disservice to the history of what people went through.”
And indeed, the violence on American Primeval is unrelenting—bloody, messy, unusually graphic. “We wanted to try and achieve a certain level of intensity,” Berg says. “It’s not stylistic and visually appealing. It’s in your face and hard-hitting, which felt true to the time period—and certainly true to the story that we wanted to tell.” Characters kill each other with immediacy—but those moments are always rooted in a nuanced historical approach. With the Mormon storyline, for instance, Smith’s scripts illustrate how the group got to Utah in the first place, posing the question of why they committed that massacre before setting off a kind of free-for-all in the West.
English (US) ·