'Hatfields & McCoys' stars talk about the central love story
'Hatfields and McCoys' stars Lindsay Pulsipher and Matt Barr talk about the star-crossed lovers they portray.
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As far as working with Lindsay, it seemed like in a couple of your scenes together, the two of you were smirking through the scenes. Like you were having way too much fun portraying the characters.
MATT: [Laughs] That’s true. We did. We were kind of buddies. We were in Romania in the middle of nowhere and we shot a lot of those scenes early on in the filming. So we all were just discovering who we were and we were so excited to be there. It’s almost like how the movie unravels: in the beginning, it’s all kind of bright and sunny and “peaches and cream,” then by the third month of filming, it’s like dark and cold and characters had died. So it kind of reflected our own journeys.
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What can you share about some of the costuming choices? Like there’s the one line where Kevin Costner’s character Devil remarks about Johnse’s “fancy boots.” Did you have any input into the costuming, or were you just wearing whatever they gave you?
MATT: I did. I had a color scheme for Johnse. So when I talked with the designer we were on the same page. A lot of the other characters had something monochromatic or kind of dull feel, which reflected that time and sort of the climate, if you will. Johnse was different, so we had these lighter colors: blues. Which to me represented the sky and the ocean — something greater that was out West. He always wanted to go find that great blue ocean, so I liked that he had some actual color in his life and his wardrobe. I thought that they did a great job with that. Now I never did get used to the hat that Johnse wore. I think every kid wants to be like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne and have some bad-ass cowboy hat. But they kept telling me that “we’re not making a cowboy movie here.” So I wore my bowler hat, or whatever it’s called. My pan-handler hat.
I think it helped define who Johnse was. It gave a sense that he wasn’t committed to being a hard, tough criminal. He was just kind of playing his part and he was like, “yeah, I’ve got to have a hat, but it doesn’t have to be that tough of a hat.”
MATT: That’s right. If you noticed, as Johnse evolved, he creates his own kind of enterprise. He makes his own money. He likes things clean and he has fancy boots, but he always has that hat. I found that kind of special.
It seemed like Johnse was hiding in plain sight. He knew he had to live up to this name, that he was part of the Hatfield family, but he had this totally different persona that he kept hidden away from everybody. Did you sense that and play that a little bit?
MATT: Yeah. He so strongly wanted to be a part of his family. He wants to be accepted like any child does. You want to be loved and there’s no one else in the world. It’s a very lonely place if you’re not surrounded by that support. You’re right, because he was different, he does kind of live in the closet in terms of how he feels. It’s really tragic that he had to live behind a facade for so many years.
Finally, what was it like to do that one scene with Kevin Costner where Devil and Johnse are fishing?
MATT: Oh, man, that was kind of the culmination — not only for Johnse and his father, but of Matt and Kevin. It was sort of that one scene that as an actor I’ve always dreamed of getting a chance to do with my idol. It was also the scene that made me want to do the movie when I read the script. As an actor, it’s crack. And we spent a whole day actually filming that one scene. It was just one of those magic days where you’re sort of half present in the moment, then I have to admit it’s an out-of-body experience and I was kind of sitting there looking down in awe at how special that moment really was. And I learned so much. I felt like a student in KC’s school. If I could relive one moment, it would be back there on that riverbank fishing with Kevin and talking about how to be an actor.
Tiffany Vogt blogs at The TV Addict.
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