“Landman” cast, co-creator tease 'frontier justice' in Taylor Sheridan oil drama: 'It's the Wild West'

Billy Bob Thornton says his character's "sense of justice" and "dark side" will both be explored in the series.

Billy Bob Thornton was in the middle of portraying the deadly Marshal Jim Courtright on the Yellowstone spinoff 1883 when series creator Taylor Sheridan approached him with an idea.

“He said he had something that he was writing, a thing for me, and we would talk about it later,” Thornton tells Entertainment Weekly. “I believe it was at the premiere of 1883 in Las Vegas when he said, ‘Okay, here's the deal. It's called Landman. It's about this.'”

This, of course, being a high-stakes family drama set against the backdrop of West Texas’ prosperous and hazardous oil and gas industry. The series is inspired by journalist Christian Wallace’s celebrated Boomtown podcast, which chronicled the trials and tribulations faced by everyday people living, working, and attempting to strike gold in the highest-yielding oil field within the United States, the Permian Basin.

Related: Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore, and Jon Hamm battle for oil in Taylor Sheridan's Landman series' first trailer

Wallace, a former writer for Texas Monthly who previously worked on an oil rig, had spoken with Sheridan prior to Boomtown’s release so, when Hollywood came knocking about converting the podcast into a television show, he knew exactly who to contact. “I reached out to Taylor because I knew that out of everyone working in that space, Taylor's voice is the most authentic to the American West,” Wallace, who serves as a co-creator and executive producer on the series, recalls. "A lot of our ideas about how to tell stories about this place really align."

He notes that the podcast is “just a launching point” for the show. “Taylor had a lot of his own ideas coming into it and already had some characters and things he wanted to do,” Wallace notes. “So we just combined some elements of the podcast with a story and the family that he already had in mind and it worked out really, really well.”

The end result was Landman, a gritty drama that follows Tommy Norris (Thornton), a no-nonsense man tasked with overseeing and protecting an oil patch for his boss and longtime friend, Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). The nature of his job, however, has kept Tommy at a distance from his loved ones, including his ex-wife Angela (Ali Larter), daughter Ainsley (1923's Michelle Randolph), and his son Cooper (Jacob Lofland).

“The oil business… it's a job where your time is very limited with the people around you, your friends, your family,” Thornton says. “And so part of this show is about that struggle to be a father and desperately wanting to be, but having a lot of trouble doing it well.”

The arrival of the fierce and fashionable Angela and Ainsley — alongside Cooper’s decision to follow in his father’s footsteps in the oil industry — is sure to shake things up for him. “It's definitely a solid family drama,” Larter says. “The heart, for me, is the family dinners, when you see everyone together and you understand their dynamic — and that in its core also, it's just a family trying to hold on and to love each other.”

Even if his job puts them all in some high-pressure situations. “[Landman is] so dependent upon the family story and their dynamic and the love and the humor that is there, but it's also about navigating the difficult and often really dangerous world of oil and gas and that part of West Texas,” Wallace adds. “There's a lot of complicated challenges out there because of the booming industry. It's kind of the Wild West out there, right? And so there's a lot of taking matters into your own hands and frontier justice, for lack of a better phrase, that we explore in the show.”

Thornton teases that viewers will get a firsthand look at Tommy’s “sense of justice” in the show. “We also see the dark side of Tommy sometimes — the part that's like, ‘If you're going to work in this business, there's certain things you have to do. And here's some of them,'" he says. While he’s wary of potential spoilers, he concedes, "The oil business is not a bunch of guys wearing white button up shirts with bow ties, saying, ‘Can I fill her up, ma'am?’ It's a different world."

Larter adds that the series will also deal with “the dangerous world of the cartel,” too. “There's so much going on and it doesn't slow down for a minute,” she says. “The show just keeps on moving and pushing through all these different worlds.”

Related: Yellowstone cast previews 'perfect ending' to the series

But it’s not all pumpjacks and plains. Landman also focuses on the high-rolling oil executives like Monty and his wife, Cami (Demi Moore), who are living life to the fullest in buzzy metropolitan cities like Fort Worth and Houston. “I think having both [sides] in this show is also really unique, because we've had Dallas before,” Wallace says. “We've had shows that showed that upstairs version of this industry, but none that showed both the working class and the white collar world."

It was also important that the series accurately portrayed roughneck life, which is why Landman hosted a three-day camp on a real workover rig to get the cast acclimated with the machinery — similar to Yellowstone's cowboy camp, if only a bit more grimy. “They really got 60, 80, feet up in the air, climbing into the derrick,” Wallace says of the actors. “I was really appreciative that we were given the opportunity to put our actors in an authentic training program, so that when it came time to shoot those scenes later in the season when we started production, they did a fantastic job. I couldn't believe it, honestly, just how convincing and authentic their portrayal of real roughnecks and people in the oil and gas industry was.”

Actually being on set, though, was an entirely different ballgame. “The last month and a half or so we were there, it was pretty darn hot and humid,” Thornton recalls. “Not to whine about it… but I've been in California for most of my life and you get used to this weather, and all of a sudden, you're in the humidity, you're working a 12, 14-hour day in the middle of an oil field where there aren't any trees. You're walking around on rocks all the time. There were long days.”

Related: Kelly Reilly on potential for more Yellowstone: 'If Taylor wants to write it, I would want to do it'

He adds, “A lot of times in a movie, you start to feel like you actually are working in whatever world you're working in the movie — I mean, it felt like I worked for an oil company every day when I got up, went to work.”

Larter had a very different experience tapping into the free-wheeling Angela and her passion for fashion. “We had to do weekly spray tans, I had to have my Gel-X’s put on every two weeks, there's a lot that goes into looking like Angela Norris. And then that kind of seeped into my everyday life, because I had to keep it up,” she teases. “But we had fun with that. And because both of these characters [Angela and Ainsley] are incredibly glamorous, and they love fabulous clothes and beautiful things, it was fun to unapologetically embrace that.”

Still, the experience had a direct effect on Thornton, who began working on music with costar and singer-songwriter Mark Collie during production. “He was writing throughout the show and he had all these fantastic collaborators, from Billy Gibbons to ZZ Top and Tanya Tucker," Wallace recalls. “That was a really fun part of the show with Billy pulling out a guitar and singing a song he had written about the show, or was inspired by the show." (Thornton, forever cool, adds, “We wrote a couple of songs [that] were kind of inspired by the area, that business world. We'll see if they end up on anything. And maybe they will, maybe they won't, but they're at least there.”)

Wallace hopes that Landman, which he considers a "love letter" to West Texas, will shine a spotlight on the thankless, difficult work happening there. “I just hope that people can appreciate the idea of people who work really hard, most of their lives, in a place that is not the prettiest. You don't have a lot of the commodities that people in big cities and across the U.S. have, but they they live there because there's a job to be done, and they are supporting their families in the best way they know how,” he says. “For better or for worse, our world runs on this stuff and, until we have another alternative, somebody has to do the dirty work. And I think that the people who do it deserve some credit and I think that is something that this show will do.”

Landman premieres Sunday, Nov. 17, on Paramount+.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.