'Outsiders' Star Ryan Hurst Talks Playing a Gentle Mountain Man and the Show's Unique Catchphrase

Ryan Hurst has played the gentle giant on Sons of Anarchy, and the more aggressive mountain man-type as Bates Motel’s mysterious Chick, and now he’ll channel both those personalities as Little Foster, a member of the mountain-dwelling Farrell family in WGN America’s new drama Outsiders.

Little Foster — the son of David Morse’s domineering daddy Big Foster — is among the leaders of a clan that has lived atop the Kentucky Appalachia-area Shay Mountain for 200 years. The Farrells live off the land (save the occasional ATV raid of a local big box store) and have their own clothing style, customs, and language (including a catchphrase destined to adorn T-shirts and coffee mugs should the show develop a devoted fanbase). They are also fiercely committed to living with no interference from those who call the town at the bottom of the mountain (or beyond) home. But when a coal company comes calling, promising jobs to the largely unemployed citizenry if it can get a crack at the natural resources on Shay Mountain, the two worlds clash, and the fight quickly gets dangerous.

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Add to that a love triangle; a Romeo and Juliet-ish romance between Farrell guy Hasil (Kyle Gallner) and sweet townie Sally-Ann (Christina Jackson); the tense father-son relationship between Little Foster and his bitter papa; the return of Asa (Joe Anderson), a Farrell clan member who went on a sabbatical to the outside world and is now meeting resistance to his desire to return to the family fold; and the well-intentioned town sheriff Wade (Thomas M. Wright), who’s developed a drug addiction while self-medicating a personal tragedy… and you’ll get why Outsiders has been compared to everything from Sons of Anarchy to Justified.

It lives in a world very much its own, however, and Hurst talks to Yahoo TV about how that was a major attraction for him, how he and his castmates are welcomed, even encouraged, to share their ideas for all aspects of the series, and how the show’s catchphrase came to him in a pre-series premonition.

What attracted you to the show?
There’s so much content out there now, but it all sort of falls into the same sort of rote procedural stuff that you see all over the place, whether it’s medical dramas, cop dramas, lawyer dramas. This was just something that, when the script started making the rounds in Hollywood, everyone gravitated to it, because no one knew what the hell it was. It was like, “What is this thing?… Is it a fantasy? No, it’s modern day.” It’s a very grounded series, but the stuff that happens, it’s so out of this world. We’ve kind of got lightning in a bottle in that it’s just a really, really different, alive kind of subject that seems to be getting people interested.

A lot of time is devoted to really setting up this unique world, with the mountain location, the language, the clothes, the customs of the Farrell clan. Was being able to do that attractive as well?
In this show, you have this clan of people, primitives, barbaric and savage, but it always feels like, "This could have happened.” It is within the realm of reality. I think it feels that way. That’s what attracted me to it the most — we have the chance to invent our own world. “What do these people believe? What do you mean they burn money? So then what do they do for money? Do they have a religion? They have their own language? Where does the language come from?” The show seems to play by the rules of a Game of Thrones, where you have the ability to start from scratch.

Peter Mattei, the series creator, told us you were responsible for the look of the Farrells’ tattoos, and even chose the tattoo artist who created them. Outsiders sounds much more collaborative than most TV shows.
Yeah, it’s a beautiful situation in that it has been 100 percent communal. A lot of times when you’re working in a group it’s difficult, because you have to strike a balance interpersonally and then amongst the group. We have such a caring, giving and talented cast that it really fell into a sort of daily “best idea wins” scenario. Both of the Peters, who I like to call the Pumpkin Eaters — Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eaters, [producer] Peter Tolan and Peter Mattei — they welcomed it. David [Morse] and I, and Kyle [Gallner] and Thomas [M. Wright] and Joe [Anderson], we all just showed up with our A-game of, “Wouldn’t this be great? Wouldn’t this make a lot of sense?” and [the producers] just wholeheartedly said, “Yes, yes, and yes, and keep those ideas coming.” It was really beautiful.

So I jumped in there with tattoos and helped with some of the language. I knew that [the Farrells] needed a war cry, so we worked on that, which became, “Ged, gedyah!” I just had this premonition that that was going to be a solid factor, something we’d want our viewers saying to one another. It’s been fantastic, and I’ve been very blessed to be in the madness, where you can even show up and say, “What about this for a storyline? That has nothing to do with my character, that has something to do with somebody else.” It was sort of emulating the mountain a little bit.

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Did that help forge a bond more quickly and foster the us-against-the world attitude of the Farrells?
Yeah, a little bit. Thomas, who plays sheriff Wade — this guy is one of my favorite actors now. I love him. He’s so good in this show I remember it was near one of the last episodes, and we were still honing in on the feel of the last couple episodes, and he was asked to do a read-through. We were all sitting around the table, and the producers and the network were on the phone. Thomas and I got into a semi-heated argument about the Asa character and where things were going at the very end. It didn’t involve either of our characters. It was just what we thought was best for the show. We were going back and forth and back and forth, and it wasn’t until afterwards where I was like, “That’s a really unique situation, where the writers and creators are allowing that to happen, and reaping the best ideas that come out of everybody contributing.” It’s really, really selfless, and I applaud them for that.

I have to follow-up on “Ged, gedyah!” which is a built-in catchphrase. It just came to you?
To be totally honest, and I know this sounds weird, but I hear things and I see things every once in a while, sometimes before they happen, sometimes when they’re going to happen. It was actually before I even got the job. I knew that these people had a handshake that was different, just like every other secret society. A biker gang is a secret society, where lines are drawn between us and them, and part of that extends into language and part of it extends into how they physically relate to one another. I just heard this thing, and I didn’t come up with the actual words. I actually put together three pages of words and could not come up with it. I had spoken to Peter. I was just like, “There’s going to be a call that they call to each other that will be multi-functional… it’ll work as their ‘May the force be with you,’ it will be ‘aloha.’ It’ll be like when they say ‘Huzzah!’ at a Renaissance Fair.” He came back, and I said, ‘I wrote three pages of things, just phonetically, sounds, and I can’t get it.’ He said, “What about ‘Ged, gedyah?’” I got goosebumps. I was like, “Yep, that’s the one.” You literally just need to hear someone say it, and there’s a sort of psychosomatic type of response to it like, “Oh, I know what that means even though I don’t know what it means.” It was right on. That’s what I was being lead to.

Your character, Little Foster, even by the halfway point of the season, there’s still a lot we don’t know about him. We know he has a complicated relationship with his father, and with his girlfriend, G’Winveer (Gillian Alexy). How much more will we learn about him by the end of the first season?
It’s going to be a frustratingly slow burn with this guy. He’s so sort of soft, amongst some very, very hard people. I really gravitated towards that, even if by the end of the season what I think people will be wanting is like, “Come on, come on! Give up and fight!” They may get it and they may not. They might get it in a way they don’t expect. It’s a very natural and slow and organic evolution of this character.

It’s not like one thing is going to happen and you’re going to see this overnight change, and that’s what I like about it. When you have an actual person who’s in the shadow of a very domineering person for their entire life, that colors how they perceive themselves. That’s what we’re really trying to bring through. Little Foster is lost and sort of a pushover. A lot of time in television, you can see the rough guy. You always get to see the badass. I liked the dichotomy of this guy with this very imposing look, but who is very fragile. Originally, he had a stutter, a terrible stutter, that we ended up losing at the last minute. It was one of those things… if it was a movie, he would have [kept] this stutter, but if we’re going to show this guy every single week, it would be a little bit tedious.

Several seasons in, you would not have been happy doing that every week.
Correct.

Little Foster is also in this love triangle with Asa and G’Winveer, and it seems inevitable that there’s going to be an explosion in that storyline.
Yes and no. I can’t give away too much. It’ll play out in a very unexpected way. When somebody’s very, very codependent — either in a relationship with his father or this woman who he’s pined after for so long — ideally what you’re going to start to see is how he identifies himself interpersonally and just as a human being, independent of these two major influences over his entire life. And the way that that transpires is very interesting. That’s all I can really say of it.

With this role on Outsiders, will you have a chance to return to Bates Motel as Chick in Season 4?
Yeah, he will be coming back. I’m shooting that right now. That character is a very, very fun role to do, and what happens this coming season is even stranger than it was last season. I’m having a lot of fun doing it.

Outsiders premieres Jan. 26 at 9 p.m. on WGN America.