There’s countless stories out of HBO’s venerated western drama series “Deadwood”. Creator David Milch crafted a three-season series that delivered what is still some of the best television of the 21st century.
One of the show’s main stars was Timothy Olyphant, an actor who had the good fortune to participate in another great series with FX’s “Justified”.
Out promoting the revival of the latter with the upcoming “Justified: City Primeval” limited series, he appeared on The Rich Eisen Show recently and shared a colorful story about what went down on the “Deadwood” set involving his character’s son.
In the series, his character of William Bullock finds his brother’s widow Martha Bullock (Anna Gunn) showing up in town with her son William (Josh Eriksson), with Seth trying to become a surrogate father to his nephew who quickly becomes liked by the town.
Then, in a shock twist, the boy is run over by an escaped horse and dies from his injuries. The death changed the course of not just the Seth Bullock character for the rest of the series but the whole series overall.
Turns out though, it all stemmed from Milch being annoyed with someone connected to the child actor. Olyphant says: “There was a character on the show – perhaps it was a younger character – and there was some brouhaha going on that someone connected to that actor was being a pain in the ass.”
The drama behind the scenes was clearly affecting Milch, which led to the decision and to Olyphant recounting Milch visiting him at his trailer and saying: “We’re going to kill the kid.” Milch then explained how the child character’s death would result in a new emotional direction for his Seth Bullock character.
Olyphant joked this wasn’t the only time this happened: “It wasn’t the first time that was a solve by the way. There was another character at one point that was a bit of an issue with scheduling, and he didn’t live long either.” For the full story on what happened, head over to The Rich Eisen Show.
