“Nobody ever said making a western was a clean affair,” says Anson Mount, the bearded hero of the shot-in-Alberta Hell on Wheels, an epic adventure set to air on AMC in November.

“I can show you the rings around the bathtub. It’s a lot of dirt.”

Mount was among those on hand Monday offering attendees of the Banff World Media festival a sneak peek of the new series, showing a trailer and two clips from the grimy and violent western.

In an hour-long panel discussion, Mount, co-star Common, producers Chad Oakes and Jeremy Gold, and AMC’s Owen Shiflett were among those introducing Hell on Wheels to a packed hall of delegates, eager to see the latest series greenlit by a network that has a golden touch with dramatic TV series.

Calgary and area has convincingly subbed in for the American West, even if the weather hasn’t been all that co-operative in the past few weeks.

“The first few weeks here in Alberta … we had epic rainstorms, flooding and hail,” Oakes says. “So we definitely jumped into the first few episodes as McCabe and Mrs. Miller. It’s muddy, it’s dirty. It looks fantastic.”

“The elements will throw at you what they throw at you,” Mount says. “And you have a choice: You can work around that or you dance with it. This crew and the creative team has done an amazing job of choosing to dance with it.”

Judging by the initial clips, the show will offer an authentically messy and unromantic look at the Wild West as a place of violence, vengeance and injustice.

It helps that the production has hired some of the top guns of the Alberta film industry, including many with a long history of shooting westerns. Among the more notable heavy lifting required by the team was to build — from scratch — a train from 1865.

“We couldn’t pull the 1865 trains from the museums in the States,” says Oakes, who runs Calgary-based Nomadic Pictures. “So we built it. That is a train built from plans we got on the Internet for $150.”

Tennessee actor Mount plays Cullen Bohannan, a former Confederate soldier who returns home to find that his wife had been raped and murdered, and his young son killed by Union soldiers. The story revolves around Bohannan tracking down the men who committed the crime, which brings him to the railroad being built to connect the country.

Common, a hip-hop artist most recently in the news for bringing his politically charged lyrics to the White House, plays Elam, an angry freed slave.

“It was a very rich character to play,” he says. “I was so moved and so inspired, because I hadn’t come across any character like this ever in my days of acting. … They were things that I’d never seen an African-American play during those times. It’s something that is rich and intriguing for me.”

Created and written by American writers Tony and Joe Gayton, Hell on Wheels was first conceived three years ago. AMC, the cable network behind such critical hits as The Killing, Breaking Bad and Mad Men, was actually looking for a western, which hearkens back to its early days when it received strong ratings airing old John Wayne movies.

But the principals of Hell on Wheels say they believe the show will offer a considerably less scrubbed look at the Wild West than audiences may be used to.

“It’s not a story about the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad. It’s a story about the building of a nation,” Mount says. “It’s not romantic at all. It’s a lot of corruption, and violence and anger and difficulty.”

   

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