Berg needed to quiz his cast before hiring them: “Are you in physical shape? Are your knees good? Are your ankles good? Is your back okay?” They were given a month of “cowboy camp,” learning to ride horses in three feet of snow. Still, one star, Taylor Kitsch, broke his foot by the second episode and was in a boot for six weeks. His colead, Betty Gilpin, still thinks about filming intense action scenes on horseback while in a corset for months on end. “Anytime one of the guys would start to complain about being uncomfortable in their costume, my hand would rise to their trachea,” she says. “I’m sure my liver is in my throat and my small intestine is in my ankle. Things have been rearranged in a way that will never go back together.”
Such visceral, violent realism helps set American Primeval, premiering January 9, apart. The show is inspired by real events, as the clashing ambitions and fears of different groups in the American West circa 1857 come to an explosive head. “It was a very lawless, wild spot in America,” Berg says.
Helming all six episodes of American Primeval, Berg settled on the Mountain Meadows Massacre as the series’ inciting tragedy. The first episode recreates the murder of hundreds of pioneers traveling from Missouri at the hands of Mormon soldiers, under orders from church president Brigham Young. This occurs as Indigenous nations including the Southern Paiutes of Utah and the Northwestern Shoshone fight for survival and security in the same territory the Mormons are encroaching on.
