For a time, Josh Brolin was done with television. He’d deliberately left the small screen in the mid-2000s, following his 2003 NBC flop Mister Sterling; he wanted to make movies, to move from one character to the next. Yet his career had stalled—until the Coen brothers came knocking. “Everybody was confused why I was hired for No Country for Old Men—they were like, ‘Why him? He was supposed to have happened and didn’t,’” Brolin says. But like the Coens, Brolin knew he was right for the role. “It’s a genre that I understand, that’s fascinating to me, that I have personal connection with,” Brolin tells me of the Western, which won the best-picture Oscar in 2008. “When I see a very serious genre hybrid-ed with a hue of absurdity, I get really excited.”

Enter Outer Range: an expansive, mind-bending, extraterrestrial odyssey through the mountains and ranches of Wyoming. Brolin quickly compares the series to No Country for its “weird” factor. Sure enough, the actor was at the top of creator Brian Watkins’s list to lead the show, which launches on Prime Video in April. Here was an icon of the modern Western, with the gravitas and résumé to anchor a tale both embracing and subverting of the genre’s well-worn tropes. Watkins wrote a letter to his dream star, whom he’d never met, to make his pitch. “I talked about how, in not just his performance in No Country for Old Men but so many other films too, he’s shaped the American imagination about the West,” Watkins tells me. “I sent him the script and lo and behold, he fell for it.”

Did he ever. Outer Range marks Brolin’s first TV-series role in about 20 years, not to mention his biggest producing credit yet. (He serves as E.P.) “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Brolin says. “It will continue to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because the responsibility factor is massive, and when you think you have control, you don’t.” But: “If you like that sort of thing, it’s heaven. And it was heaven for me.

Brolin plays Royal Abbott, an old-school cowboy and patriarch tested by horrors both known and unknown. In the former category: His daughter-in-law has gone missing, and simmering tension with the rival Tillerson family is about to reach a boil. And in the latter: A giant metaphysical void has popped up on the Abbott property, representing…something. An alternate dimension? Aliens? Nightmares? As Royal stumbles upon it, we quickly glean that it’s his—and our—destiny to find out. Eventually.

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