Smallscreen Features

'Justified' bad boy Boyd, Walton Goggins interview, drama airs Mar. 16

By April MacIntyre Mar 16, 2010, 0:35 GMT

Premiere Screening of Justified held at The Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles, California on March 8th, 2010. Walton Goggins EPA Fame Pictures, Inc - Santa Monica, CA, USA - +1 (310) 395-0500

In scripted drama, FX is the home of the outlaw, bad boy, rebel and ethically bedeviled lawman, and Elmore Leonard's "Justified" starring Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins, is the latest jewel to this crown.

"Justified" is such a layered, slow-cooking and meaty dish it's hard to synopsize it in a clever tag line.

There's a lot going on inside the person of US Marshal Raylan Givens, a cryptic yet straight forward "mean what I say, say what I mean" throwback to the masculine screen idols of yore: Wayne, McQueen and a touch of Cooper.

Givens is like Gen. George Patton, he is a notable man alive in the wrong period of time, as he smokes bad guys without breaking his stride in Miami, hat intact, his hubris and nonchalant attitude win him a one way ticket back to the sticks of Kentucky, his home turf.

Lucky for us, because the other element that makes this so damned watchable is the King of the snake oil salesman, a tightly wound southern tornado embodied in his old coal mine buddy, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins).

Goggins is so good as Boyd, electric in his energy and brought to life when his old pal, now a lawman, comes back home.  Raylan is the only one who sees right through Crowder for what he is, and the ruse he is pulling on the local racist rubes believing they're part of some grand big picture.

Crowder's literally a rebel with a malleable cause.  Whatever suits his fast thinking wits he adopts, recruits and moves ahead.

Givens is based on the character created by Elmore Leonard, (Get Shorty) who serves as executive producer on "Justified."

The pilot is lush, and obviously shot back east.  The series is now shot in Santa Clarita, and it will be a real fait d'accompli if the art department and the location manager can replicate the foliage and architectural look. 

This series is the best drama to come along since "Sons of Anarchy," another fine FX testosterone drenched yarn.

Monsters and Critics spoke to Walton Goggins the other day about this new bad boy role in FX's "Justified" which airs Tuesday night, March 16 at 10:00 PM ET/PT.

I so enjoy your take on bad boys.  You have so much fun with this character.  It’s hard not to like “Boyd” even though he’s vile, and I was wondering if you could talk about how you see him, his character and share with us your interpretation of “Boyd Crowder.”

W. Goggins That’s kind of been my blessing and my curse to get these deviant kind of complicated bad guys and to salvage some sort of humanity.  I’m trying to get them to give me good guys, and I keep trying, so I know I’m going to crack that nut some day. 

For me when I joined forces with these guys, first and foremost, to get the opportunity to be back on what I consider to be my home network, FX was too good to pass up, and that coupled with Tim Olyphant who’s been a friend for quite some time.  I’m a fan, obviously, of his work on Deadwood, and Graham Yost and his career and what he’s done.

But for me the most important aspect to this character and one of the most enticing reasons for me to play “Boyd Crowder” was a creative conversation that I had with both Tim and Graham, and that is I was interested in playing this guy as one of the smartest guys in the room and someone who did not necessarily believe the axioms that he was espousing. 

I don’t believe that this is a simpleton.  “Boyd Crowder” is not a simpleton.  He’s not a racist.  He’s an extremist in his genetic makeup.  Even if it came down to watching football or shopping for antiques, this is a guy who doesn’t live in gray.  He lives in black and white and extremes.  There’s no middle for this guy.

I think the thing I was most excited about once we filmed the pilot and once we kind of started going down this road and exploring who this guy was, was the opportunity to do something different for the TV audience.  In my experience over the course of my career and various pilots that I’ve been involved with and obviously The Shield, the pilot episode is an opportunity of that show to get familiar with all of its players.  It’s not meant to give you every answer. 

It’s just meant to give you an opportunity to say, well, do I want to spend time with these people?  We’re asking a lot of the audience to spend time with us, so you just want to get them comfortable with the story. 

What was so exciting for me and playing “Boyd Crowder” was you think you get to know him in the pilot only to realize that he goes in a 180 degree different direction in episode two, and then you really start to get to know him as I as the actor got to know him, as Graham as the writer got to write him, and as Tim as “Raylan” got to act against him, so it’s really been an extraordinary experience for this guy. 

“Boyd” starts off with Hitler tattoos on one arm, and by the end of the season may as well have Jesus freak tattooed all over himself by episode 13.  That’s fascinating.  That’s a fascinating guy, so it was just the opportunity to kind of play in that kind of complex sandbox that really kind of motivated me to join up with this very talented group of filmmakers, television creators.

Since you mentioned tattoos.  It’s a crafts question.  I was fascinated with what Viggo Mortensen went through with Eastern Promises with the tattoo applications, and you are festooned with tattoos, your boy “Crowder” in this particular series, and I was wondering if you could talk about that, if it’s transfers.  How many tattoos do you have and what did you go through?

W. Goggins That’s a great question.  I was doing Predators, this new movie for FOX simultaneously, and this character that I play in the movie is “Walter Stands,” and I had a plethora of ink all up and down my skin.  It required like an hour and forty-five minutes sitting in a chair every day. 

This is no secret.  I was in an orange jumpsuit for that movie and would come back to the set of Justified and literally not change my outfit, but change the tattoos, so it was extraordinary. 

Once you have ink on your body, how it informs you as an actor, and you kind of get in that space and occupy that space of that character, when you’re without them, when I’m just Walton Goggins in the world and I’m without my tattoos, I feel a little naked. 

I think for a person like “Boyd” he expresses himself through the tattoos, the markings that he has on his body, and you’ll see it change hopefully over the course of this show and be reflected in his ink, and probably what I’d like to do is just the rudimentary solution, just kind of cross out the tattoos that I don’t really believe in anymore, not remove them, just kind of put like an X through them or like a line through them so it’s really kind of a history of who this guy is.  I don’t think that’s been done on television before, but FX, they do that a lot.  They do things that haven’t been done on television before.