‘Hell on Wheels’: 6 Things We Learned From Our Facebook Live Chat with Anson Mount

Hell on Wheels returns Saturday night to AMC for its final run, with seven episodes remaining. If you don’t remember where the midseason finale left off in August 2015, that would be with The Swede (Christopher Heyerdahl) and Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) both racing to Cullen’s wife and child, and the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads racing to Ogden.

Of course Mount wasn’t about to spoil how the showdown between The Swede and Bohannon will play out when he visited Yahoo TV for a Facebook live chat earlier this week, but here are five things he was able to share. Watch the full conversation below.

1. It’s go time. These remaining hours are action-packed (and not just the one that may feature the coolest shootout on TV since Justified’s Season 1 finale, “Bulletville”). “We had a limited amount of time to do the third act, and you can’t have a Western unless you have consequence,” Mount says. “So there is a lot of consequence that we are wrapping up in these final seven.”

2. He does not miss having Cullen’s beard — or long hair — yet. “I‘m sure that I’ll miss the beard and the hair at some point. I don’t right now. I’m very happy not to be having a contentious relationship with my bath towel anymore,” he says. “And also, it tends to get in the way of other roles. You wouldn’t believe the number of jobs that get determined by hair and just stupid stuff like that.”

3. He does have souvenirs to remember Bohannon by. “I couldn’t keep any of the guns, obviously, because of gun-trafficking laws, but I wanted to,” he says. (The show shot in Alberta, Canada.) “I kept his flask. We had several golden spikes made, I kept the one we actually used. I kept the spike that I actually drove, which was not the golden spike. And a really cool map, a period map of the United States at that time that was on leather and done with water colors.”

4. He’s sticking with TV. “I’ve got a couple of movies in my near future, but the thing I’m hunting for is my next television series,” he says. “I really fell in love with long-form drama. I want to find something that makes sense creatively and not just jump at the next thing. What tickles my gut is usually very specific, and so I know it when I read it. I just haven’t quite read it yet.”

He’s also enjoyed the kind of creative input he’s been able to have as a producer on Hell on Wheels. “I’m getting to a place in my career where I’m not relishing seeing my footage packed up and sent to an editor that I’ve never met before, and not being able to say, ‘Hey, you’re actually missing an angle that we shot.’ I think that it is beneficial to the overall product for there to be a conversation between the people that are in the writers’ room, and in the editing room, and were on set at the time. So, I’m gonna try as hard as I can to maintain my ability to at least participate in the conversation. Because I think I’m good, at the end of the day, of knowing who my boss is, and I think I handle that responsibility in a mature way,” he says with a laugh. “But we’ll see. There’s a stigma being an actor. It carries a lot of baggage.”

5. He was never seriously injured during the making of Hell on Wheels, but he could have been. "When we were shooting episodes 501 and 502 on the mountain with all those snow scenes, at the end of one day, me and Reg Rogers grabbed a couple of sleds and we sledded all the way down that ski slope. And we picked up some heavy speed, too. I almost got in trouble. I could have killed myself, actually. We were goin’ fast,” he says.

Also, he notes, “I did the entire six years of Hell on Wheels, and then right afterwards went to a trampoline park with my friends in Calgary and I tore an ACL. Six years of riding horse past gopher holes, and I tear an ACL on a trampoline. But I was lookin’ good ‘til that happened. I was the old man turnin’ flips… and then I was the old man being carried out and going to the emergency room.”

6. He does a pretty good Christopher Walken impression. He spun our wheel and landed on “improv,” which meant he was asked if he could impersonate any other actors. Cue his excellent story about the time his cellphone rang while he was watching Christopher Walken film a scene for their 2002 movie Poolhall Junkies.

Hell on Wheels airs Saturdays at 9 p.m. on AMC.