Thanks to the mega-success of Yellowstone, everyone wants to see Kevin Costner in a cowboy hat! As a Thanksgiving football alternative, SundanceTV is reloading the 2012 shoot-’em-up series Hatfields & McCoys — nominated for 16 Emmys, one of those won by Costner — for back-to-back airings. Here’s a look at the three-parter, taken from the original TV Guide Magazine preview by David Hochman.
For Kevin Costner, the beard was probably the toughest part. “It went on one hair at a time, singly laid in,” he says of the old-man whiskers he wears for the epic Hatfields & McCoys. Costner plays Devil Anse Hatfield, patriarch and neighbor-from-hell to Randall McCoy (the late Bill Paxton, equally fuzzy-faced), from ages 30 to 73. “My chin would get poked and prodded for an hour every morning,” says Costner. “I’d play music, I’d talk to people, but it never got any easier.”
His forbearance speaks to the passion the actor brings to Hatfields, a project that had him grubbing it for weeks in drizzly Transylvania, 100 miles outside of Bucharest. “Apparently, the forests of Romania today look very much the way West Virginia and Kentucky did in those bloody years after the Civil War,” Costner says.
The Hatfield-McCoy saga began around 1865, when one murder escalated into the bitterest of feuds between once-friendly clans on opposite sides of the Tug Fork River. It’s the perfect historical backdrop for six hours of rifle-popping, hog-stealing, squirrel-hunting good times.
“This is a war that defined our country in many ways,” Paxton says. “Any subsequent feud that sprung up between families or even sports teams got branded a Hatfields-and-McCoys situation. This is our chance to tell the real story behind the legend.”
The miniseries also stars Tom Berenger as Jim Vance, the real troublemaker among the Hatfields; the late Powers Boothe as Wall Hatfield, Devil Anse’s even-keeled older brother and a local judge; and Mare Winningham as Randall McCoy’s loyal wife, Sally. To nail the authenticity, actors were trained to ride stallions, shoot heavy weapons and live without — sweet Abraham Lincoln! — reliable Wi-Fi in the Carpathian Mountains. Oh, and among the cast, 94 actors were subjected to hand-glued beards.
Hatfields & McCoys, Thursday, November 23, 1:15/12:15c and 8/7c, SundanceTV