Back in November, I was invited to observe some location filming for Hap and Leonard’s third season, “The Two-Bear Mambo.” The series films in Georgia, and on that particular day the focus was on a pivotal Episode 5 scene that I will not spoil. But as I talked about in my interview with the show’s cast, the vibe on set was a really positive one. This is a show where everyone working on it knows it's good, and for good reason. Still, as has been revealed in the premiere, Season 3 is also taking on some dark, unexpectedly relevant material for a story that takes place in the late 80s and published by author Joe R. Lansdale in the mid-90s. When I spoke with EP John Wirth about this new season, my first question was about what it was like navigating this subject matter that feels timely, even though it was never meant to be.
“Last spring when Jim Mickle and I were beginning our discussions [...] we started talking about the book, saying, ‘How are we gonna make the Klan relevant, in this day and age? Who cares?’" Wirth said. "And then we convened the writer's room, we start talking, we're developing the story, and then Charlottesville happens. All of a sudden, it's super relevant, and we're completely on point, and we're telling a story that ... I'm not sure who else is really approaching this subject matter in this way, on television right now. But it's a provocative story. People are nervous about it.”
“The trick with this show, or any show, in my view, but particularly this show with this kind of subject matter that we deal with, is to tell the story without commenting on it,” he continued. “I don't want to tell people, ‘Hey, we're doing a story about the Ku Klux Klan and here's why it's important.’ I just want to tell the story, and let people draw whatever conclusions they want to draw from it […] We have dug deep, and we're trying to represent what's happening in certain parts of the country, with certain groups of people, unlikely groups of people, when they come into contact, and they're forced to declare their agenda, on both sides.”
Friendship, Mysteries, and Florida
The reason why the story involves the Klan this season, of course, is because Florida Grange (Tiffany Mack) visits this racist hovel of Grovetown and goes missing. Hap (James Purefoy) and Leonard (Michael K. Williams) go to find her, but that mystery goes throughout the season. Wirth said it was very important to always keep Florida present in the story, though.
In those first episodes, “it happens through Hap's obsessive fantasies and dreaming about her. We didn't want to show the traditional, overused Klan images of hoods and crosses and all that, in the real world, because we felt like it'd been overused [but] we decided to overuse it again in our fantasy worlds. So Hap has a series of dreams where he's imagining what's happened to Florida, and we see that all the way through. And then in the fourth episode, we just decided to stop, and tell the story of what happened to her when she got to Grovetown, and what she experienced.”
In addition to following their involvement in Florida’s story, Season 3 also zeroes in on an interesting new chapter of Hap and Leonard’s relationship. “I think one of the hallmarks of the show, what makes the show distinctive, and different from other buddy shows on television, is the nature of the relationship between the two men,” Worth told me. “And we really examine and challenge that relationship this year. For our die-hard fans who are into those two characters, to watch that journey and to wonder [why Leonard’s] all beat up, or Hap is making bullets at his house and doing target practice and they're not together. What is that all about? And we keep just laying out the breadcrumbs of, ‘you're gonna see.’”
New Season 3 Cast Members
Though many of the characters in Season 3 will be familiar to fans of the show, there are some new faces, including that of Louis Gossett, Jr., who plays a veterinarian and diner cook named Bacon. “We’d been looking for something for Lou,” Wirth told me. “And he and Michael [K. Williams] are close, so when this story came up, and I read the book, and I thought, ‘Hey, Bacon would be perfect, but we can't just have Lou come in and be a cook.’ So we started talking about the Bacon character and how we could flesh him out.”
Gossett, Jr. also spoke with me about the evolution of his character from page to screen in my earlier interview, and Wirth echoed that, saying, “the character evolved from the character in the book, and then it evolved after it was put on paper. And then there are a couple of significant scenes. […] In the third episode, when Leonard goes looking for Bacon. And he finds Bacon in the church at choir practice. They have a conversation, because Leonard's looking for Florida, and he accuses Bacon of being Uncle Tom […] It's pretty intense.”
Another new character this year is Officer Reynolds, who in Lansdale’s novel is a male character. “We had Sneed, and we all love this character Sneed. And Reynolds was basically another version of Sneed,” Wirth explained. “So I said, ‘Why would we get rid of Evan Gamble, who we love, who plays Sneed, to go on a worldwide search to try to find another actor to basically play that character with a different name?’”
At that point, the writers decided that making Reynolds a woman could open up a whole host of possibilities. “We ended up casting this wonderful actor named Laura Allen,” Wirth said. “I thought the character would be more like a man in a woman's body, playing that part, [but] she does it in such a unique way.”
In keeping with its anthology-esque nature, Season 3 sees the addition of several great actors to the series, including Corbin Bernsen and Pat Healy, as well as the Atlanta musician Curtis Harding. But one of the most intriguing casting choices is Andrew Dice Clay. “I can't remember the genesis of that character, [but] we thought that we needed the perspective of an outsider, in this Klan town. So it ended up to be this Jewish shock jock from New York who was passing as a Southern good ol' boy guy, in Grovetown. And then, as we started thinking about who could do that, and Andrew Dice Clay was the first name on everybody's lips,” Wirth told us.
“We had to twist ourselves into pretzels to make it work […] It was a wild ride, for a couple days. And the thing that I discovered about him as an actor and also as a person, is I felt a tremendous amount of empathy toward him. And that's odd to say, if you think back on the Dice character from 20 years ago, or 25 years ago. He was such an in-your-face ass, and presenting a very specific point of view that not many people had the balls to represent. It was challenging to keep him on script, sometimes, but what he offered, off-script, is really additive to the show. So I'm very pleased with what he brought to us.”
Texas Charm, and Finding the Right Tone
It’s always refreshing to see a series that really makes its location matter, and Hap and Leonard has done that with aplomb since Season 1. As is evident from the premiere, this year's the story takes place around Christmas, and as Wirth explained, “one of the things I wanted to do this year is get a little more distinctive in terms of what music we're using, so we try to get music that is Texas-based artists. Last year we had East Texas hip hop and rap. This year, we have Christmas music, but also artists that are Texas-based and going back to some classic blues, because Sonny Knox [Andrew Dice Clay] is the blues radio guy. So we have a nice entrance into blues.”
That commitment to authenticity is one of the show’s best qualities, and those who have read Lansdale’s novels will know that he has an amazing ear for a southern cadence in particular. It’s funny, it’s poignant, but most of all, it’s real. “It's so Texas,” Wirth said. “I think we've been able to capture that, in the series [but] I’m not conscious of it. I think I'm just going with the flow that presents from the source material, and then as it gets chewed up, swallowed, digested, and coughed back up onto script page ... And then in the way it's portrayed by these two actors, there really is that thing of really funny stuff between them, because they're very funny guys, and they're funny together. And then they get into this vice … then boom, the comedy pulls them out. That's a high wire act, too.
Wirth went on to explain that it was a lesson he learned the hard way from Don Johnson on Nash Bridges, when they wrote in a bad guy who commented on Nash Bridges’ (outrageous) clothes. “Don called me up and it was a rough phone call. And he was right. Because he said, ‘If somebody is commenting on my clothes, it's undercutting the reality of my character. And then that will undercut the stakes that we're trying to create in the episode.’”
It’s important for the show to be careful to balance its humor in a way that doesn’t go too far into parody. “I would always find myself saying to the directors, ‘Don't put a hat on a hat,’” Wirth told me. “We're not doing anything because it's funny. We're just doing it. And if it's funny, okay. You might laugh at something I don't laugh at. And that's the way life should be.”
Hap and Leonard: The Two-Bear Mambo airs Wednesday nights on SundanceTV
