How did you come to be a part of Hell on Wheels?
CHRISTOPHER HEYERDAHL: Well, luck and providence, I suppose. They say, “What’s luck? Preparation and opportunity.” So, I guess the opportunity came, in the form of an audition. I put myself on tape, and they responded to it. I went in and did a call-back audition, and they felt that we were on the same track. My idea of who The Swede was, was the same as theirs, and vice versa. This kind of character is very rare, with the fact that it fit so well with my background and my understanding of a Norwegian man. It all just fell into place. I still get a little choked up thinking about how often a character like this comes along. For the viewer, it’s quite interesting. It’s not a character that we see very often, and certainly not in this form. As an actor, it seemed to be tailor-made for me. It’s quite wonderful.
The Gaytons and their writing team have really put together a difficult group of people, in that we can’t really pigeonhole them. There are so many wonderful characters in this tale. You have a hero, but is he a hero? I think he does hold true to that. The way Anson [Mount] is playing Cullen Bohannon, he holds everything very close to the chest. He hasn’t taken the easy way. You progressively get more and more evidence that he is, in fact, the hero. He makes very moral choices, and he hasn’t lost that moral stronghold and that thing that makes us good human beings. Whereas a character like The Swede, as hard as he may try, I think he’s lost a little bit of his morality.
The interesting thing about these characters is that they’ve all, for the most part, been through this tearing up of brothers and families, and they’ve come out of it scarred, as the country came out of it scarred. They’re interesting characters because of that. They’ve come through a really horrible thing, and how they’re surviving is not always pretty. A lot of them are lost, certainly, in Hell on Wheels. It’s a rough and tough group of damaged people. The lifespan for a woman in that town means that, theoretically, we really shouldn’t see any of them again next year. It was pretty awful for a woman.
Source: Full interview @ Collider
Streaming Options
Sign Up for the SpoilerTV Newsletter where we talk all things TV!
Recommendations
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
