Timothy Olyphant says Raylan Givens is a 'fish out of water' in Justified: City Primeval
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You've never seen Raylan Givens like this.
After six seasons of enforcing his own brand of justice on Justified, the U.S. marshal played by Timothy Olyphant is back for another modern Western adventure in FX's highly anticipated revival series Justified: City Primeval. But while Raylan still has a penchant for his iconic hat and epic showdowns, viewers are going to see him in a totally new light this time around.
"It's a bit of a fish-out-of-water deal," Olyphant tells EW in an interview conducted prior to the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Chuck Hodes/FX Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens in 'Justified: City Primeval'
Having left the hollers of Kentucky 15 years ago, Raylan now lives in Miami, a walking anachronism balancing his life as a U.S. marshal and part-time father of a 15-year-old girl, Willa (played by Olyphant's daughter, Vivian Olyphant). When a chance encounter on a Florida highway sends Raylan and Willa to Detroit, he crosses paths with Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook), a.k.a. the Oklahoma Wildman, a violent, sociopathic desperado who's already slipped through the fingers of Detroit's finest once and aims to do so again with the help of his formidable lawyer Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis). The three characters set out on a collision course in classic Elmore Leonard fashion, to see who makes it out of City Primeval alive.
With the new location and all these new characters, Olyphant knows it's a lot to take in. But despite all the changes, he promises this is still the same Justified and Raylan Givens that fans fell in love with during the show's original run.
"We went and got a Boyd, so that helped us," the actor jokes, referencing the new addition of Holbrook as the show's villain after Walton Goggins' iconic run as career criminal Boyd Crowder. "It's definitely a different vibe, familiar but totally different. Everything about it felt right, and I hope people enjoy it."
After Justified aired its series finale in 2015, Olyphant always knew he wanted to return to the character and this world. He just needed to find the right story. "And the best place to look is Elmore," he says. Olyphant doesn't recall when he first read the author's crime novel City Primeval (which features homicide detective Raymond Cruz as its protagonist), but one of the times he picked it up again was while he was filming Justified.
"I remember thinking, 'Oh my God, this is a Raylan story. It's the exact same story and it's the same guy,'" he says, which led to showrunners Dave Andron and Michael Dinner adapting it with Raylan as the main character. "It just felt like it was an easy world for us to jump into."
All the pieces were finally in place, so when Olyphant arrived on set for the first day of filming Justified: City Primeval and picked up Raylan's hat again, it felt like coming home. "It was that old 'Wasn't it just yesterday?' kind of feeling," he says. "It's just such a comfortable place to work from, and then there was something really refreshing about it because there was so many new faces. It was just that perfect amount of familiarity, and then totally foreign at the same time."
Justified: City Primeval premieres Tuesday on FX.
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