AMC railroad drama puts Mount's career on track
When first sighted, Cullen Bohannon is in Washington, D.C. He is a man of few words and piercing, haunted eyes. A Confederate soldier in the just-concluded Civil War, he now has unfinished business of his own: avenging the death of his wife.
So he heads west to work on the transcontinental railroad and settle some scores at the Union Pacific construction camp.
That, in a nutshell, describes “Hell on Wheels,” an epic new AMC drama taking its title from the term for the movable community that will accompany the drudgerous laying of track through fierce frontier. It is here in this transient world of harsh nature, brute ambition and clashing personalities that much of the action will take place in the series, which premieres Sunday.
It stars Colm Meaney, Dominique McElligott, Ben Esler, Philip Burke, Eddie Spears and rapper-actor Common, as well as Anson Mount in a role that maybe, just maybe, will launch him into stardom.
Or maybe not. Either way, the 38-year-old Mount professes not to care.
Raised in a small town in Tennessee, he says he grabbed the role of Bohannon because “it's hard to find Southern characters that are not stereotyped or vilified or aggrandized. And this managed to escape all those traps.
Besides, he liked Bohannon's taciturn style.
“I'm an enemy of exposition,” says Mount in his honeyed Southern twang. “I feel there's no need to overstate.”
In the past, Mount starred in the NBC lawyer drama “Conviction” and as an undercover FBI agent in the short-lived ABC series “Line of Fire.”
His films include “City by the Sea,” “In Her Shoes” and the upcoming “Straw Dogs,” as well as the 2002 romantic road picture “Crossroads,” where he co-starred with Britney Spears and was hailed by one teen fanzine as a “knockout newcomer.”
For whatever reason, Mount did not emerge from “Crossroads” as the Next Big Thing. Nor, he insists, did he expect to.
“At the time I just saw it as a great work opportunity, and a chance to make some money that I could use to go on vacation,” he says. “It was everybody else who put me in this sort of good-looking, next-big-leading man category.”
“Hell on Wheels” puts more than just his looks to the test. The main production for the 10 episodes stretched from May through August in Alberta, British Columbia, whose rugged outback represented 19th-century American prairie and mountains.
“It was rough, man,” says Mount, describing a breakneck shooting schedule with most days spent outdoors in weather always in flux: “We had one day where, before lunch, it went from overcast to rain to sleet, and then it started to hail, to snow, to rain, to hail again. Then after lunch, the sun came out.” He laughs. “YOU try to make continuity on a day like that!
“In a situation like that, you either freak out, or you decide that you're going to dance with it,” he says. “It forces you into a creative corner, and there's something about that I really kind of like.”
“Hell on Wheels”
Premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6, on AMC