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

Berg needed to quiz his cast members before he hired them: “Are you physically fit? Are your knees good? Are your ankles good? Is your back okay?” They got a month of “cowboy camp” where they learned to ride horses in three feet of snow. Taylor Kitsch, broke his foot on the second episode and was in a boot for six weeks. His colead, Betty Gilpin, still think about filming intense action scenes on horseback while in a corset for months on end. “Every time one of the guys would start complaining about being uncomfortable in their costume, my hand would raise their windpipe,” 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, premiere January 9, except. The show is inspired by real events as the conflicting ambitions and fears of various groups in the American West circa 1857 come to an explosive head. “It was a very lawless, wild place in America,” says Berg.

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 who traveled from Missouri at the hands of Mormon soldiers, on the orders of Church President Brigham Young. This occurs as Native nations, including the Southern Paiutes of Utah and the northwestern Shoshone, struggle for survival and security in the same territory that the Mormons are encroaching on.