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.
Outer Range is difficult to pinpoint, its shades of Yellowstone and Westworld (continuing in prestige TV’s ongoing Western trend) gradually giving way to a true singularity. Early on, we get to know Royal and his family, particularly matriarch Ceceilia (Lili Taylor); an enigmatic young visitor, the seemingly out-of-place Autumn (Imogen Poots), sets up camp on the land and promises disruption. But there’s a lot going on in Watkins’s brain as his story carefully, bizarrely unfolds. The first-time creator, best known as a playwright, takes a big swing for his television debut. He and Brolin, similarly in a new behind-the-scenes role, had to figure things out on the fly. “It was, at times, baptism by fire,” Watkins admits. “It was the most joyous, exhilarating, challenging process I’ve ever been through and I think a lot of us have been through.
“There was a lot of talk…a whole learning curve,” Brolin adds. “There’s a few shows out there where you watch a pilot and it’s really good, and then you just see it get worse. A positive for us is it gets better.” (The series, Brolin says, is envisioned to run beyond a single season.)
“I grew up around a lot of Autumns. They are very mercurial and wonderful to be around, and also the kind of person that says, ‘Let’s go jump off that cliff,’” says creator Brian Watkins. “Imogen knew this woman through and through in the most beautiful way, and lent her immense craft to that character.”
Outer Range conjures a feeling of boundlessness—even beyond said void. Under music supervisor Gabe Hilfer (The Underground Railroad, Don’t Look Up), suspenseful tones and twangs make for a surreally thrilling mix; the cinematography, first captured in the pilot by director Alonso Ruizpalacios (Narcos: Mexico) and D.P. Adam Newport-Berra (Euphoria), evokes astounding grandeur. The scripts patiently juggle mysteries, untangling new ones by the hour as they all slowly weave together. There’s nothing quite like it. “I grew up in the West, where the show is set, and it’s really a place where the unknown is everywhere you look,” says Watkins, who was raised in Colorado. “You can walk up to the edge of a forest and stare into the trees and feel you’re at the threshold of another dimension.”
“Can we talk about the hole?” Lili Taylor isn’t sure what she can reveal for her first interview about Outer Range. And you can’t blame her: She spent dozens of weeks in Santa Fe, where the season was filmed, immersed in a wild ride. She’d learn about huge twists only moments before a script arrived, via a phone call from Watkins. The creative team was discovering the show, it seemed, as they were making it. Secrecy and collaboration went hand in hand. (The hole, for the record, was fair game for these interviews.)
The production came about after a long process, and not without difficulty. Amazon initially bought the pilot script, written by Watkins on spec. He then fleshed out the story (via a “bible” that outlined the mythology) to secure a series order. Plan B, the Oscar-winning specialty studio cofounded by Brad Pitt, came aboard, having recently developed what would become their lauded Prime Video debut, The Underground Railroad. Brolin and Watkins took their first meeting in New York in mid-March 2020—the day before, both tell me separately, the world shut down due to COVID-19. Nearly a year of rejiggering followed; locations from north to south were considered and discarded. (“There had been a light snow, but it looked like kitty litter and I couldn’t do it,” Brolin says of scouting Winnipeg. “I didn’t want to do the Western in kitty litter.”) At the top of 2021, the team finally landed in Santa Fe for a grueling but rewarding shoot. “We started in the dead of winter, which might not have been the smartest move,” Brolin says. “When we were doing nights, it was probably between eight and 12 degrees out. We were out in the middle of nowhere.”
“I would never want to compare myself with a military person, but in certain ways, it was a warlike feeling,” Taylor adds. “We were in the trenches, and I was sacrificing something for my family and for me.”
With that, though, tight bonds were forged. Watkins brought to set his feel for theater, for creating a company. Rehearsals preceded filming; he gave actors classic Westerns to watch, music to listen to, philosophy to digest. Brolin and Poots, whose characters’ increasingly strange and pivotal dynamic propels the series, read Harold Pinter together and performed elaborate trust exercises. “It would be funny to see what the show would be like without that, because we just all became incredibly close—that’s total honesty,” Poots says. “Normally I don’t think that can happen. I’d just do the work and then I go home, and I prefer that. But on this I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t get enough of these people.’” She credits Brolin for setting the tone: “He instilled the whole troupe with ease and, therefore, confidence and bravery.”
The intensity with which each actor could approach their characters (due to tight COVID protocols and the remoteness of the location—they had nowhere to go for over seven months) results in nuanced performances. Brolin is at his weary, laconic, soulful best. You never know what Poots is going to do from one minute to the next; ditto Schitt’s Creek alum Noah Reid, who pops as the youngest Tillerson brother. (Other key roles are played by Ozark scene-stealer Tom Pelphrey as Royal’s son, Tamara Podemski as the town’s acting sheriff, and Will Patton as the ailing Tillerson patriarch.)
Or look to Taylor, who’s been Emmy-nominated for TV work across three different decades (The X-Files; Six Feet Under; American Crime), relishing this rare leading role. In fact, the Abbotts’ faith-driven matriarch was offered straight to her. “It was my dream character—gun-toting, horse-riding, tough as nails—and I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Is this really something that they want for me, or is this going straight to Nicole Kidman?’” Taylor recalls with a laugh. “I felt like she was in my wheelhouse, but it was the size of the role—the league. I was just surprised. Whatever, maybe my esteem is low.” (For the record, Brolin says of his costar, “Lili Taylor is one of my favorite people ever. She’s an incredible actress.”)
Amid the complicated, sprawling narrative, it’s the place that dominated the shoot. The mountains. The quiet. The sky. “Santa Fe is the land of enchantment—that’s what it’s called out there,” Watkins says. “I’ve always told people that this show is me asking the question, What would happen if a disenchanted world stumbled upon enchantment? The themes of the show were just rife with meaning out there, and right before our eyes.”
Watkins points to the phrase “uphold the wonder” as his guiding mantra through the maze of character study, sci-fi parable, and Western homage that Outer Range creates. It’ll be a good one for viewers to remember too, as they dive headfirst into its world, its mix of operatic tragedy and absurdist humor. The setting grounds it all. “I’m not a spiritual person, but you can’t help but just be bowled over by the spectacle of that landscape,” Poots says. “It really is a beast.” Outer Range hopes to win over viewers the same way.
Outer Range premieres this April on Prime Video. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive spring TV coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.
