Inside ‘American Primeval,’ Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin’s Bloody, Brutal Western Epic

Peter Berg did not use words when describing his vision for American Primeval. Mark L. Smith, the writer best known for The Revenant, walked into Berg’s office preparing to discuss a survival show in the vein of the 1972 Robert Redford Western, Jeremiah Johnson. Instead, Berg showed Smith a Stiletto ice axe—and nothing else. “Can we do this as a show?” Berg asked. Smith smiled, said yes. As Berg explains it, “We wanted to make a show that required us to go into the elements.”

This turned out to be a bit of an understatement. Their breathless new Netflix miniseries demanded a 145-day shoot way up in the New Mexico mountains—“at altitude in the weather, with wolves and bears and snakes,” Berg says. “Films like this cheat, and go into sound stages or parking lots and use green screens. We were all very excited to not do that. It required getting up very early, four o’clock in the morning, driving an hour and a half outside of Santa Fe to different pieces of land, oftentimes different reservations that we were filming on—and setting up in the dark when it was extremely cold.”

Berg needed to quiz his cast before hiring them: “Are you in physical shape? Are your knees good? Are your ankles good? Is your back okay?” They were given a month of “cowboy camp,” learning to ride horses in three feet of snow. Still, one star, Taylor Kitsch, broke his foot by the second episode and was in a boot for six weeks. His colead, Betty Gilpin, still thinks about filming intense action scenes on horseback while in a corset for months on end. “Anytime one of the guys would start to complain about being uncomfortable in their costume, my hand would rise to their trachea,” she says. “I’m sure my liver is in my throat and my small intestine is in my ankle. Things have been rearranged in a way that will never go back together.”

Such visceral, violent realism helps set American Primeval, premiering January 9, apart. The show is inspired by real events, as the clashing ambitions and fears of different groups in the American West circa 1857 come to an explosive head. “It was a very lawless, wild spot in America,” Berg says.

Helming all six episodes of American Primeval, Berg settled on the Mountain Meadows Massacre as the series’ inciting tragedy. The first episode recreates the murder of hundreds of pioneers traveling from Missouri at the hands of Mormon soldiers, under orders from church president Brigham Young. This occurs as Indigenous nations including the Southern Paiutes of Utah and the Northwestern Shoshone fight for survival and security in the same territory the Mormons are encroaching on.

Courtesy of Netflix

We learn of these warring cultures through a relatively intimate, if plenty fraught, dynamic: a mother named Sara (Gilpin), who’s searching for her husband and trying to keep her young son alive amid the bloodshed, with a grieving local named Isaac (Kitsch) enlisted to help guide her to safety.

Kitsch, whose working relationship with Berg goes back decades to the Friday Night Lights pilot, signed onto American Primeval instantly. For starters, Isaac felt like “a once-in-a-lifetime role.” Kitsch lost about 25 pounds in the lead-up to filming, and otherwise spent a full year preparing. When Berg first called about the project, Kitsch was showing his brother his new property in Bozeman, Montana. In other words, American Primeval was meeting the actor at home. “He prefers to spend his time tracking wolves with his camera to running around New York City or Hollywood or any of that kind of stuff,” Berg says.

The demands of the role also introduced Kitsch to a set of traditions he’d never encountered before. We meet Isaac after he’s essentially lost everything he cares about: He was raised on a Shoshone reservation after being sold off as a young child. “It’s not just this American that’s lost his family—you have this whole intertwining relationship with the Native community that he’s more loyal to than anybody else,” Kitsch says. “Anytime you’re taking on a culture, you’ve got to do your best to get it right—and it’s tough because I didn’t have much time with them, so I’m getting into these very intense questions early. That took a bit, for them to trust me.”

In addition to learning the language, Kitsch worked with a shaman that he still practices with today. He experienced Native sweats and is now planning to build one on his own property. “Everything is circular with them and there is no ending, which I think is incredibly beautiful,” he says. “The spiritual side of myself was opened up through this process. I lost my father while we were shooting this, and that helped me a lot. To have that access that I would never have had if I had not done this job was, I think, meant to be.”

There’s one harrowing sequence in American Primeval that Gilpin offered to help shape. She and Berg spoke extensively about how to approach it in the script. “She basically wrote what I thought was a very powerful scene,” Berg says. “I don’t know that there are many actors that could have done that: (a) perform it the way she performed it, and (b) really be deeply involved in creation and finding the words to help get the character out of that spot.”

Gilpin was all-in on Berg’s gritty vision, and found Kitsch an inspiring scene partner, with their heated push-and-pull dynamic anchoring the series amid the brutal surrounding bloodshed. “He’s fluent in the Shoshone language, basically,” she says. “It was so impressive and so rare. When your scene partner is that invested, it just makes you step up.” And she felt a vital alignment with Berg’s philosophy for the series, which was simply: Make it feel real.

Courtesy of Netflix

“We wanted to be really true to 1857, and paint a real picture of what it must have been like for a woman who was raised in a society that told her, ‘Okay, your job is to sit in a pretty dress and write a letter and then go to sleep, or wait for people to visit you and get married. And die reading a pearl-embossed Bible in a bubble,’” Gilpin says. “There’s a tendency to want to make female characters like Sara badass and fearless. I think that just does a disservice to the history of what people went through.”

And indeed, the violence on American Primeval is unrelenting—bloody, messy, unusually graphic. “We wanted to try and achieve a certain level of intensity,” Berg says. “It’s not stylistic and visually appealing. It’s in your face and hard-hitting, which felt true to the time period—and certainly true to the story that we wanted to tell.” Characters kill each other with immediacy—but those moments are always rooted in a nuanced historical approach. With the Mormon storyline, for instance, Smith’s scripts illustrate how the group got to Utah in the first place, posing the question of why they committed that massacre before setting off a kind of free-for-all in the West.

The violence committed by Paiutes and Shoshone characters was also rooted in authenticity—however unpleasant. “I don’t believe in changing history. It was a violent time,” says Julie O’Keefe, an indigenous consultant on American Primeval who previously worked on Killers of the Flower Moon. “When I think of all the stories that are out there, 574 tribes plus hundreds of thousands of stories, they’re all violent. What happened in particular with the community that I am a part of and what was done to us, I think that this is an authentic portrayal. People shouldn’t necessarily have anything sugarcoated.”

There’s no risk of that on American Primeval. “Cut to day two, you’re like, Goddamn, did we really sign up for this?” Kitsch says. “But that kind of stuff I love and live for. There’s no acting required. You’re genuinely just freezing your ass off and fighting for your life.”

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