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Netflix’s epic – and epically bloody – new western, American Primeval, is here to start our streaming year in brutal, widescreen style. With comparisons being made to Leonardo DiCaprio survival epic The Revenant, it’s the kind of series where even innocent bystanders are liable to end up scalped – or worse.
It’s written by The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith and directed by Peter Berg, the A-list action auteur behind Lone Survivor and The Kingdom, who replaces the automatic weaponry with arrows, tomahawks and Bowie knives to deliver action (and blood) by the bucketload. He’s cast his old Friday Night Lights muse Taylor Kitsch as a grizzled loner with a dark back story, alongside GLOW’s Betty Gilpin as a homesteader with, well, the same thing. She and her young son are caught up in the violence as she makes her way to her husband in California.
What is American Primeval about?
Employing a suitably murky colour palette, American Primeval recreates a dark, violent and not especially well-known chapter in American history: the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Taking place in the vast expanse of America’s west in 1857, it saw a group of bloodthirsty Mormons slaughtering at least 120 men, women and children from the Baker-Fancher emigrant wagon train as it crossed disputed territory. The Mormon militia group, known as the Nauvoo Legion, made the killings look like they were the act of local indigenous warriors to throw the US Army off the scent. What followed left the area strewn with bodies.
But while the Mormons are the villains of the tale, no one in the world of American Primeval is exactly saintly. The closest the show has to a hero, Kitsch’s grizzled but fundamentally noble loner, is a pitiless killer when he needs to be. Which is often. Dane Deehan’s dazed Mormon, meanwhile, is caught between survival and his adoration for his reluctant wife (Hoard’s Saura Lightfoot-Leon), now in the hands of the vengeful Shoshone warriors.
Mission: Impossible cult hero Shea Whigham is Jim Bridger, who, as the founder of the muddy but well-defended Fort Bridger, is the one man interested in keeping some semblance of order in this gun-crazy world.
Where was American Primeval filmed?
While the story that unfolds on-screen took place in the 19th century Utah Territory – now Utah state – the show was filmed entirely in New Mexico, 600 miles to the south east.
The production, which saw Kitsch suffering a broken foot during a fight scene, was nearly as brutally elemental as the story it depicts. Filming ran for 130 days – only two days of which were on indoor sets. ‘This was a show that was not shot on sound stages or backlots,’ says Peter Berg. ‘We were up in the mountains of New Mexico for 13 months filming at altitude, in the snow, and the rain, and the thunder, and the lightning. We had rattlesnakes pretty much every day on set.’
The show’s production design went fully method, with set builders using only tools available in the 1800s to construct its version of Fort Bridger. ‘I would go out there in the dead of winter and it was cold,’ remembers Berg, ‘and they were out there in T-shirts because they were just axing wood all day long and trenching with shovels and building it in the style that it would’ve been built.’
The New Mexico locations used included the small towns of Cochiti Pueblo and Santa Clara Pueblo, sound stages in Sante Fe, and Pajarito Ski Mountain.
Bonanza Creek Ranch in northern New Mexico, a staple western location since the days of Jimmy Stewart, also featured, as did the Charles R Ranch near Sante Fe. The privately owned ranch was once used for Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz cowboy western All the Pretty Horses (2000) and takes visitor bookings for hikers and, aptly, archery lovers.
According to Film New Mexico, American Primeval called on the the services of a whopping 4,000 New Mexicans – 3,420 as extras, 750 as crew members, and 20 actors.
Who stars in American Primeval?
Alongside Kitsch, Gilpin, DeHaan, Whigham and Lightfoot-Leon, the western series boasts Terminator Genisys’ Jai Courtney as a bounty hunter, Kim Coates as real-life Mormon leader Brigham Young, Alex Breaux as Nauvoo militiaman Wild Bill Hickman, Shawnee Pourier as traumatised Shoshone woman Two Moons, and Derek Hinkey as Shoshone warrior Red Feather.
How can I watch the series?
All six hour-long episodes are streaming now on Netflix.
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