Garret Dillahunt joins the cast of Fear The Walking Dead season four - find out about the genial actor here.
Fear The Walking Dead returns to our screens this month - and the new series promises to be the darkest and most exciting yet.
We will finally discover who escaped from the Gonzales Dam explosion at the end of season 3 – and we also have a clutch of new characters to look out for. For starters, Lennie James will create a little bit of history when his character, Morgan Jones, becomes the first to cross over from The Walking Dead and join the cast of the spin-off.
Previews show that Morgan bands together with a woman named Althea, played by Lost's Maggie Grace, and a cowboy-like character by the name of John, who will be played by experienced TV and movie actor Garret Dillahunt.
Find out everything you need to know about the 53-year old American here.
They liked him so much on Deadwood – they cast him twice
Dillahunt's real breakthrough came when he joined the cast of the hit HBO series Deadwood, playing Jack McCall, the killer of Wild Bill Hickok. The role was a finite one, lasting six episodes in the show's first season. “On the last day, I was I was pretty sad,” says the actor. “I said to David (Milch, show creator), “This is it, huh?” And he was like, “Yeah, well, come here. I’ve been thinking about something.”
Remarkably, Milch asked Dillahunt to return in the show's second season to play a completely different character, the ruthless and violent Francis Wollcott. “I’m not sure what was going through David’s head. It might have just been convenient. But I’d like to think he liked to work with me,” he said later.
Despite his roles, he's not from the Midwest America – or crazy
Dillahunt is often cast as throwbacks, rednecks and blue-collar characters from the South and Midwest US, but he's actually from Washington state, far up in the north-western corner of the country. He's also known for playing the odd gimlet-eyed loon, for example in Deadwood, or the 2009 horror film Last House on the Left; despite this, he started out in comedy shows.
“I had a really hard time getting an audition for anything dramatic when I was doing comedies,” he told AV Club. “People would say, 'Oh, he’s a sitcom guy'. Then you start doing other things, and they say, 'Oh, he can’t do comedy. He’s the serial killer, or whatever else'."
He's said that Burt, the goofball character he played in the series Raising Hope (pictured below), was more like himself than anything else he'd ever played.
He was once a Terminator
Dillahunt was cast as the robot Cromartie in the Fox spin-off series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which aired from 2008 to 2009. He particularly enjoyed the physical and stunt aspects of the show – but found the water-based stunts a little harder.
“We did the whole day in this gigantic tank – I think it's the same place they shot Titanic,” he told CW11 News. “They tied a rope to my ankle and just drug me down to the bottom of the tank all day long – because apparently Terminators can't swim! There's a lot of pressure down there, I tell you.”
He often selects projects based on the source material
Dillahunt makes no secret of the fact that he was a fan of The Walking Dead comic books before being cast in Fear The Walking Dead – but he admits that he is attracted to roles in adaptations of books he has enjoyed; he appeared in The Road and No Country For Old Men, both written by Cormac McCarthy.
“A lot of things I’m attracted to are based on books that I’m a fan of. I don’t get real nervous around most folks, but I get real girly around writers and stuff. There was Ron Hansen for Jesse James, and I’ve been a Cormac McCarthy fan since college... I missed All The Pretty Horses - I think I was still in college at the time - but I was determined to be in every Cormac McCarthy adaptation ever made!”
He's pretty happy playing a cowboy type
Dillahunt is never more comfortable than when playing a character from the old West. “I remember when Deadwood came around, I was very excited... so I got an audition for the doctor (character), which I was very annoyed about, because I thought, 'all these years of waiting to be in a cowboy thing, and I’m going to play the town doc? I wanna ride a horse! I want a gun!'"
Though he ended up playing a different character – the cowboy-type roles have continued, including those in The Assassination of Jesse James alongside Brad Pitt, and the FX series Justified. Of his character John in Fear The Walking Dead, Dillahunt told BT.com: “He’s got cowboy tendencies – he IS a real cowboy even, he likes his six guns, is good with them."
He wants to cross over to The Walking Dead
Dillahunt told BT.com that he 'lobbied' Scott Gimple, executive producer on The Walking Dead, to play the role of Negan, and while it came to nothing: “I think he remembered me and sort of wrote it with me in mind… and it was an easy sell!”
Now Lennie James has joined the cast as Morgan Jones, we asked Garret if he would like to make the switch the other way – and got an emphatic response. “Oh, yeah! I’m hoping to be so good that that's a desired thing... I’m hoping they’ll ask me, 'will you please go over and kill Negan?' And I’ll say 'sure!'”
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