“I couldn’t believe that a show or a film… in an expansive, big-scale, John Ford-ian way hadn’t existed,” recalls David Oyelowo when he was approached years ago about a project centering on the real-life frontiersman Bass Reeves, who was one of the first Black Deputy U.S. Marshals following the Civil War. The actor — who executive producers and stars in the title role of the Paramount+ limited series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” — thought it was a “head scratcher” that nobody had adapted his story to the screen with the character in the leading role. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
This is not the first time Oyelowo has portrayed a historical figure on screen, of course, as he previously starred as Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay’s “Selma.” The actor shares that he finds “real joy” in “playing characters that really moved the needle historically, but for whatever reason we know less about them than we should.” When it came to Bass Reeves, he notes that “way less people know about him than should, but it’s a very beloved genre” and adds that in the post-Civil War era, “one in four cowboys were indeed Black.”
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One facet of the real-life Reeves that really appealed to Oyelowo was his disposition. As the performer describes, “You have someone who’s coming out of enslavement who you could say has every right to be embittered, vengeful, and destructive,” but “he chooses a different path” as an “exemplary citizen” who conducts “his life as a lawman with a level of fairness that you could completely forgive him for not having.”
Over the course of its eight episodes, “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” features exquisite cinematography depicting the sweeping landscapes of Arkansas and the Indigenous lands where the Marshal worked. Oyelowo admits that the conditions during their six-month shoot in Texas were “even more taxing” than he anticipated. Aside from the year of training he underwent in order to be strong enough to inhabit the physically-demanding part, the entire cast and crew endured incredibly inclement weather, from “ice storms that would regularly shut down production” to “the kind of heat that literally had people going home with heat stroke.” The actor says he used those challenging conditions to inform his performance and “embraced the fact that, well, this was what these folks were dealing with back in the day.”
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Oyelowo’s extensive experience on the stage in both London and New York also helped him prepare for playing Reeves, as the series shows the Marshal over the course of almost two decades. He shares that when doing Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” “I had nearly a year of working on a play whereby you can’t rely on prosthetics and CGI and all that stuff” to depict your character at varying ages, but rather “you have to find it in your body, you have to find it in your voice.” The actor also notes how with Reeves in particular, his “voice changed over the course of the show. His gait changed… going from enslavement to empowerment.”
One of the most powerful aspects of “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” is how it depicts Reeves’ crisis of conscience of being a former slave who now captures fellow Black men and occasionally delivers them to their deaths. As Oyelowo describes, Reeves grew up “enslaved by white men who represent fear, represent brutality, represent the notion of owing another human being, treating them like chattel” and later in life has “another white man in the form of Judge Isaac Parker, as played by Donald Sutherland, who is now going to empower you to enforce the law when slavery was the law… it must have been head-spinning.” He sums up Reeves’ position in this question: “Am I an instrument for good or an instrument for ill?”
For his performance, Oyelowo has earned Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes nominations.
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