Joe Gilgun is good with all the gore in Preacher
Genre-hopping show crams humour, action and violence with questions about life
If you ever need to find actor Joe Gilgun on the New Mexico set of AMC’s new supernatural western Preacher, just follow the trail of blood.
“(I’m) constantly covered in blood,” the tattooed Englishman playing an Irish vampire exclaimed with a kind of mischievous glee. “There are hand prints everywhere, on the doors. My trailer was like a kill room.”
A distressing statement. Yet declared with Gilgun’s disarmingly captivating rapid-fire cadence, it’s as if he’s daring you to be entertained by the uncomfortable imagery. And that’s Preacher in a nutshell.
The new drama series airing Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC relishes the absurd and obscene. And if you can’t help but crack a smile, blame Gilgun’s cheeky delivery.
It helps that the actor has been cast in a role he seems born to play. Think Billy Idol if he were a bloodthirsty vampire, but one blessedly free of the usually requisite vampire fangs. Gilgun, of course, finds the fun in all the other vampire perks, specifically getting ridiculously doused in gore.
“Blood and my character are like peas and carrots,” Gilgun said. “I’ll have to put the outfit on that I had the night before and that was covered in cold, sticky (fake blood). It’s just like being covered in actual blood only it doesn’t smell of iron. It’s like minty.”
Adapted from the hyperviolent, 1990s comics created by writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon, Preacher took almost a decade to get made.
Thanks to the non-stop persistence of Hollywood comedy darlings Evan Goldberg (writer of Pineapple Express) and actor Seth Rogen, Preacher was eventually delivered into the hands of writer-producer Sam Catlin of Breaking Bad fame. Together, the trio finally christened Preacher with a pilot that crammed humour, action and a pondering of the meaning of existence into a single hour of television.
Set in the no-horse town of Annville, Texas, the series follows the prodigal son turned village preacher Jessie Custer (Dominic Cooper) as he attempts to guide his meagre flock into salvation. Jessie must head toward the light while avoiding job propositions from his ex-crime part- ner (and ex-girlfriend) Tulip (Ruth Negga) and the high jinks of one marooned vampire named Cassidy (Gilgun). Because of divine intervention (or pure happenstance), the preacher, the con and the vampire become entangled in a holy war.
Even the premise sounds like the start of a joke that lands with a biblical apocalypse twist. And AMC is hoping that the Frankensteined mashup of styles will keep the series unique.
“It’s so genre-hopping,” executive producer Catlin said. “It can be a serious drama about the meaning of life; it can be a silly Monty Pythonesque comedy; it can be a crazy-violent (Quentin) Tarantino (film). It’s a western. It has a lot of different tones to it that I haven’t seen before on TV.”
So how did Preacher find the bal- ance between the silly and the serious?
“There’s different treatments of violence,” Catlin explained. “On Breaking Bad . . . if someone got punched on the nose, they would have a bloody nose. In a lot of ways, the violence in that show would hit harder than the violence we have on Preacher.”
Even Tulip, who in the comics at first is seen as “slightly timid,” comes Preacher. on strong in the AMC series.
“When you first meet her,” Negga said of Tulip’s TV introduction, “it’s during this fight scene. We wanted to make immediate impact for the audience. And an immediate emotional connection.”
“She’s got a real problem with her temperament,” Catlin said. “I’m very excited about it. You don’t see angry women on TV very much.”
While the first episode of Preacher had three impressively choreographed fight scenes, Gilgun warned that things would cool off a bit.
“We can’t have enormous amounts of blood, terrible gore, every episode,” Gilgun said. “There’s nothing to look forward to in that sense. It’s like a spliff, like having a joint. If you smoke it all day long, endlessly, it’s just something you do. It’s not a treat anymore, is it?”
Gilgun applies the same dissection to pry open the mind of his 119-yearold character. “I know he’s funny, but he’s constantly being shot,” Gilgun said. “It’s agony. It’s the same pain as it is for a normal human being, (but) he’s got used to being shot. He’s got used to pulling bullets out. You think about it, get rid of the comical aspects of it, he’s a really sad man.”
Instead of living the Interview With a Vampire life of lace and luxury, Cassidy is broke and spends most of his time drinking away the minutes on his endless clock. We will witness the character struggle with the reality of his absurd existence.
Will the genre splicing win over the modern-day TV audience? Will folks fall for the Irish vampire with great banter but a deeply twisted past? No one can say for sure, not even Catlin, who confesses that he may be looking for a job in a couple of months. But he does know that Preacher comes in strong. And with today’s television audiences, there’s really no other way you can introduce an idea this intricate. You gotta go big.
“There’s just been so much great, innovative television in the last 10 years that sort of the paved the way: The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad,” Catlin said. “People took really big swings on those shows and they paid off. Now audiences expect big swings. Audiences are so much more sophisticated and so much more . . . cynical is too pejorative a word, but they’ve seen a lot of great stuff. So it takes a lot to surprise them. I think AMC and Sony know that Preacher is nothing if not a big swing.”
And if Preacher can make folks wince when a ridiculous vampire takes a bullet, perhaps it has a prayer of a chance with today’s audience.