Television: So Wicked, He’s Good

As Saloonkeeper Al Swearengen on HBO’s Deadwood, Ian McShane once swindled a prospector, had him killed and then tried to fleece his widow. He has bribed officials and orchestrated or covered up numerous robberies and murders. And he very nearly killed an orphan girl for witnessing her family’s massacre.

But his greatest act of criminality was stealing the show. When Deadwood debuted last year, HBO did not promote Swearengen as the lead. The cast is an ensemble, and since when is the bad guy the star of a western? But as the season unfolded, the complex, amoral yet philosophical master of the Gem Saloon came to dominate the show with greasy, foulmouthed splendor.

Sitting down to a scrambled-egg breakfast at the Shutters on the Beach hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., McShane, 62, has the happy air of a man who has got away with something. The British character actor just won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV drama, and though in real life he’s a grandpa and, for 20 years now, a teetotaler, he betrays a bit of his character’s roguish confidence. As soon as he landed the role, he says, he bought a house just down the coast. “I had a feeling it would go on for some time,” he says.

He was one of the few to feel that way. Before Deadwood, TV westerns had been out of fashion. But the story of the bloody pursuit of riches and the emergence of law in a South Dakota gold-prospecting outpost turned into a respectable hit for HBO.

McShane too was no obvious bet. A working actor since age 17, he was a minor TV star in Britain and little known in the U.S. His best-known role here was as another baddie, in the 2000 indie crime movie Sexy Beast. “The question was how his [Mancunian] accent would play in such a quintessentially American role,” says HBO entertainment president Carolyn Strauss. But, says creator David Milch, McShane dropped the accent and inhabited the role so thoroughly that he overcame Milch’s doubts.

Many actors might play such a character with wicked intensity. McShane excels at bringing out Swearengen’s contradictions, not just with bluster but also with “the slightest gesture and simple stare,” in the words of Timothy Olyphant, who plays Seth Bullock, the town sheriff and Swearengen’s headstrong counterweight. Swearengen is coarse yet intelligent, brutal yet subtle. “He is the primitive in the modern world,” says McShane. “Swearengen is the smartest man in town, but he knows that because of his nature he will not be accepted. So he pulls the strings behind the scenes.” But he has his own, odd kind of principle. In the first season’s most arresting scene, he smothers to death a preacher who is dying slowly of a brain tumor. The act is tender and cruel, merciful and selfish (the reverend is taking up a bed in the Gem), and McShane simply leaves us to ponder which motivation is dominant.

In the second season (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T.; premieres March 6), Swearengen is under pressure as the territory prepares to be absorbed by the expanding U.S., bringing the threat of law and competition from corporations and other opportunists. When he sees workers putting up telegraph poles, what is progress to others is an encroachment on his action. “By all means, let’s plant poles all across the country!” he shouts. “Festoon the c___sucker with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our judgments! Ain’t the state of things sorry enough? Don’t we already face enough f____in’ imponderables?”

Just as a Shakespearean actor can make iambic pentameter sound natural, so McShane brings Milch’s profane yet lofty dialogue to life. And he makes Swearengen the embodiment of the feral, vital greed that fueled a nation’s growth. His character is loathsome but, McShane notes, also “the galvanizing force behind what the camp would become–a legitimate place for people to live.” Civilization may be closing in on Al Swearengen’s mining town, but his rich character offers Ian McShane plenty of gold yet to strike. –Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles