There’s a new sheriff in town in A&E’S ‘Longmire’
Aussie actor has an American look
Tall, broad-shouldered and sporting gray stubble on his square jaw, Robert Taylor, in boot-cut jeans and a faded denim shirt, looks very much the iconic male of the hardscrabble American West.
But Taylor, who portrays a Wyoming sheriff in Longmire, the A&E series that premieres
Sunday (10 ET/ Longmire, PT), was born A&E, Sunday,
and bred in Aus10 ET/PT
tralia — a fact, he says, that makes him more like an American than not.
“It’s a similar kind of deal, the outback of Australia and the American West,” says Taylor, who, like Walt Longmire, speaks sparely and to the point. “People’s similarities are more striking than the differences. They are very much the same. Open spaces affect the way people treat each other, the pace of life. I certainly responded to it. It’s my kind of pace.”
Longmire is based on a series of novels by Wyoming ranch owner Craig Johnson; As the Crow Flies, the eighth, was published this month. Longmire is an old-fashioned hero driven by a thirst for justice, an anti- CSI lawman who doesn’t carry a cellphone and solves crimes through dogged legwork.
Taylor, a busy actor with international film credits, was picked to play the unflappable sheriff of fictional Absaroka County in part because American viewers may not know his face. Best known in the USA for his role as Agent Jones in The Matrix, he laughs when it’s mentioned: “Maybe. I’m one of three bad guys who all look the same.”
But not having a recognizable face — executive producer Greer Shephard says he was “hoping to find someone who didn’t come to the screen carrying any iconographic baggage from a previous role” — as well as having that “Marlboro man” aura has worked in his favor.
“We wanted Steve McQueen, Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood, because that was the spirit we got out of the books,” says John Coveny, an executive producer who worked with Shephard and Hunt Baldwin, also an executive producer, on TNT’s The Closer. Taylor “has a piece of each of those men in him. He’s tough, he’s a thinker, has a wry sense of humor.
“We needed a man you could
“We wanted Steve McQueen, Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood, because that was the spirit we got out of the books.”
watch thinking and still find compelling.”
Choosing Taylor works for his creator as well. “I’m not John Grisham or Stephen King, so I can’t dictate to Hollywood what they should do and how they should do it,” Johnson says. Nonetheless, he believes the producers “really captured the tone of the books, the feel of the characters and a respect for the place that is Wyoming.”
And he loves Taylor’s Longmire. “He’s a handsome booger but also looks like he’s got some mileage on him, which I think is important with this type of character. He’s not a six-week wonder. This is a guy who’s been out there doing the job for a long time.”
Shephard says the show’s big open-spaces setting (it’s set in Wyoming but is filmed in New Mexico) “begets very different types of crime from the crimes you’ll find in urban landscapes. We felt like it was going to give our stories a shot of adrenaline and a type of originality.” Sunday’s premiere has Longmire searching for a girl who is missing from the reservation.
Executive producer
John Coveny
The show explores such Western subcultures as the Native American experience — Lou Diamond Phillips plays Longmire’s closest friend, Henry Standing Bear — plus the rodeo circuit and Mennonite communities. Adding a dose of urban is Katee Sackhoff ( Battlestar Gallactica) as deputy Vic Moretti, a transplant from the East.
“That’s the beauty of this show,” Coveny says. “There isn’t a modern-day Western on TV, and when you combine it with this crime-world procedural you really have a fresh kind of show to watch. Every director, every kid, every TV or movie fan — you talk about Westerns and their eyes light up because of the expanse of the land, the connection to nature, that primal game you played as kids.”