‘Hell on Wheels’ Postmortem: Anson Mount Talks The Swede’s Fate
Anson Mount in ‘Hell on Wheels’ (Photos: Michelle Faye/AMC)
Warning: This interview contains spoilers for the Season 5 mid-season premiere of Hell on Wheels, “Two Soldiers.”
AMC’s Hell on Wheels returned Saturday night for the first of its final seven episodes and ended one of the show’s longest-running feuds. After Cullen (Anson Mount) saved Naomi and William from The Swede (Christopher Heyerdahl) — who managed to put a bullet in Bohannon’s leg — Cullen insisted on taking The Swede on a two-day ride to be judged and hanged for his latest murders.
One of the episode’s most memorable moments was Cullen, barely able to stand, trying to drag The Swede’s momentarily unconscious body through the desert after their horses, spooked by a fight, ran off. But that’s not how that scene was supposed to play out in Drumheller, which stood in for the Utah desert.
Christopher Heyerdahl and Mount ride
“It had just rained, and getting the equipment in there took a ridiculous part of the day, and then moving around took a ridiculous part of the day, so we were already running behind. And then in the script, the horse is supposed to drag Chris, and the horse just wasn’t havin’ it — the horse was not having something dragged behind him,” Mount says. “So we’re like, ‘How is Cullen gonna do this with one leg?’ And I was like, ‘You know, that’s actually a pretty good challenge.‘”
The makeup team gives Mount heatstroke
In the moment, Mount decided Cullen was losing his mind. “He was going into heatstroke, and it was a fight or flight response. I had to do it several times. Part of it wasn’t really acting,” he says with a laugh. “I was just so damn exhausted. I was really beat up. That was one of those days that I got a bit of applause from the crew at the end.”
Heyerdahl filming
Over the course of the episode, Cullen could have drowned the Swede, let a snake bite him, or shot him. But he didn’t. “When I first read it, it hadn’t really sunk in what the writers were doing. My first response to [showrunner] John Wirth was to say, ‘You know you are denying the audience what they’ve been hoping for, for five years, which is Cullen putting a bullet in that Swede’s head.’ And he said, ‘Exactly.’ And then I read it again, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ The path that Cullen has been on, one of healing and maturing, it just would have set him back to square one. So the challenge for Cullen to not kill The Swede, to get him to that fort, it was both internally and externally a fantastic arc to play in just that one episode.”
The Swede’s last stand
Mount thinks it’s one of the best episodes the series has ever done. It ended with The Swede hanging — yes, he’s dead this time — but it began with a flashback to Thor Gundersen, a well-liked, harmonica-playing Union solider from Norway, being captured by Confederate soldiers and forced to kill a friend/fellow prisoner who tried to feed on him. (There was an earlier cut where The Swede ended up feeding on that guy, Mount adds.)
“What that first scene does is it shows you that he was just a regular guy at one point,” Mount says. “He was a regular dude, and he was created by war.”
Related: ‘Hell on Wheels’: 6 Things We Learned From Our Facebook Live Chat with Anson Mount
Hell on Wheels airs Saturdays at 9 p.m. on AMC.
