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When it comes to working with director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Battle Ship, Lone Survivor), Taylor Kitsch (also Friday Night Lights, Battle Ship, Lone Survivor) has a simple approach.
“I have no choice,” Kitsch tells Den of Geek. “There’s just a brotherhood that’s there. And a trust.”
That trust between director and performer is now set to be put to good use again in American Primeval, a six-episode Western miniseries set to debut to Netflix on January 9, 2025. Set around the real life events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, American Primeval is described as “a fictionalized dramatization and examination of the violent collision of culture, religion, and community [in the 19th century American West] as men and women fight and die to keep or control this land.”
One of the men fighting for control is Isaac (Kitsch), a mysterious frontiersman who agrees to shepherd a woman named Sara (Betty Gilpin) and her son (Preston Mota) across southern Utah past militiamen, bounty hunters, Paiute and renegade Shoshone tribes, and the Mormon army. It’s a dangerous journey to be sure, and a violent one. Just how violent, you ask? Well Netflix has helpfully provided an exclusive clip from the series that shows how quickly things can turn on a dime in the Old West. Give it a look below!
Here we see Isaac and Sara approach some fur traders with a simple request to buy their horses. The traders, however, have been tipped off that a woman and her son are traveling through the area and there will be a considerable reward for turning them in to bounty hunters. Rather than accepting $100 for the horses (which, according to an inflation calculator would be about $4,100 now), they decide the bounty is probably the better reward. Unfortunately for them, that’s the last decision they ever make.
Watching Taylor Kitsch spring into action as a scion of old-timey Western vengeance, you get a sense of why the Canadian actor is happy to keep answering Peter Berg’s calls. Isaac looks like some unholy cross between Wolverine and John Wick as he quickly empties his pistol into two traders then procures a hatchet to violently finish off the rest. The whole melee takes roughly 10 seconds and by the end of it, at least five assailants are a bloody mush and Isaac and company are ready to continue on with their new, now free, transportation.
Bro, you should have just sold them those horses.
In addition to Kitsch and Gilpin, American Primeval stars Dane DeHaan, Saura Lightfoot-Leon, Derek Hinkey, Joe Tippett, Jai Courtney, Preston Mota, Shawnee Pourier, and Shea Whigham, and Kim Coates as Mormon leader Brigham Young. The miniseries was created and written by Mark L. Smith and executive produced by Eric Newman and Alex Gayner. Julie O’Keefe serves Indigenous Cultural Consultant and Project Advisor.
All six episodes of American Primeval premiere Thursday, January 9 on Netflix.
The post American Primeval: Taylor Kitsch Is a Western Action Star in Bloody New Clip appeared first on Den of Geek.
