James Purefoy

James Purefoy was already a prominent television and stage actor in the U.K. when he found fame in the U.S. with his role on HBO’s Rome. He went on to play the lead in the NBC summer series The Philanthropist, where he met Michael K. Williams of The Wire and Boardwalk Empire fame. Last year, fresh off his stint playing serial killer Joe Carroll in FOX’s The Following, Purefoy was back on set with Williams for Hap and Leonard. Nick Damici and Jim Mickle penned the six-part series for SundanceTV, based on the set of books by Joe R. Lansdale and sold internationally by Entertainment One Television. Purefoy tells TV Drama about the 1980s-set show, billed as a “darkly comic swamp noir” with two unlikely best friends, a get-rich-quick scheme and plenty of eccentric characters.

TV DRAMA: What attracted you to the role of Hap Collins in Hap and Leonard?
PUREFOY: I grew up in a very rural community in England. It was full of farm workers and people who worked in the industrialized countryside. It’s a very different world of chicken farms and pig farms, and it’s quite rough in many ways. I grew up with a lot of guys like Hap Collins. People who found themselves in their 30s and 40s, slightly stuck in dead-end jobs and not really having had a chance in life. We meet Hap and Leonard when they’re in their mid-40s. They’re rosarians—which is a fancy word for rose pickers. Hap is a white, blue-collar, East Texan man who spent a couple of years in prison in his 20s for not going to Vietnam. Leonard Pine, who is played by Michael K. Williams, is an African American ex-Marine, who happens to be gay and has a lot of anger issues. You wonder, how come these two people are friends? They seem to be a very odd couple. Over the course of the show you see flashbacks to when they were little boys. The reason they’re such good friends is heartbreakingly sweet and lovely. They will always be friends; they fight and bicker and yell at each other, but they have a deep respect and love for each other.

TV DRAMA: The Texan accent cannot have been an easy one for you to master!
PUREFOY: It’s not an easy one to do. I don’t think it’s easy for anyone to do unless you come from Texas. When American actors talk to me about it, I hear, “Aww man, that’s a hard one, that’s tough!” It is tough. It is very particular, very specific, but you grow into it and you work with a dialect coach. Joe Lansdale, who wrote the books, was on set all the time, and he’s got a very thick East Texan accent. So I would turn to him and say, “How do you say this?” and he’d give me a tip.

TV DRAMA: Did you contine using the Texan accent even when you weren’t filming?
PUREFOY: I find it embarrassing [to stay in character] because everyone knows I’m English. [Laughs] Why are you speaking funny to me? I should maybe try to stay in it. I know there are English actors who stay in [their American accents] all the way through. I just feel like a bit of an ass when I do that. I’m not saying they are; I’m just saying that’s how I feel.

TV DRAMA: What has your working relationship with Michael K. Williams been like?
PUREFOY: It’s terrific. I did a show a few years back called The Philanthropist for NBC. I played a billionaire philanthropist and Michael played my security guy, jet pilot and truck driver. He was my go-to factotum. We shot the whole thing over many months in southern Africa and Central Europe and had a really good time. That’s how Hap and Leonard came to me—through Michael. I was just wrapping up The Following, I was leaving New York and I got a call from him. I had been at a party with him a couple of nights before that. He said, You’ve got to read this script, I really want you to do this show with me. He had already been cast as Leonard, they hadn’t cast Hap yet, and the rest is history.

TV DRAMA: And how has working with Sundance Studios and SundanceTV been?
PUREFOY: It’s been really good. I loved doing The Following, but sometimes the decision-making process [on a network show]—about whether you can change something you say or what you are going to wear, all of that micromanagement of every tiny detail about you—can become irritating and difficult. You want to say, just get out of my character, this is what I want to do and this is how I’d like to play it. Because [broadcast networks] have to scoop up as many viewers as they can, the bumps that make characters interesting often get ironed out. When you’re filming television, you’re shooting really fast, you’re shooting a lot, and there isn’t time to do multiple takes. If you want to do another slightly different version [of a scene], oftentimes there simply isn’t time. With Hap and Leonard, everybody who was involved in the creative process—the two writers, the author of the novels—was on set all the time. Everything was happening right around the camera, so the decision-making process was instantaneous. It wasn’t, “L.A. isn’t awake yet so we’ve got to shoot this shit rather than the version we’ve all come to a decision about, which is clearly better.”

TV DRAMA: What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in TV since you started working in it?
PUREFOY: The massive change now is the attitude toward tele­vision. When Hollywood [stopped making] so many $30-million independent movies, those writers had to go somewhere. They’re brilliant, extraordinary writers, and they moved into television. As soon as that happened, they had much more power. We all know that the scriptwriter on movies is often pushed aside as soon as production begins. The scriptwriter on a television show is god—the person everybody pays obeisance to and without whose permission nothing can be changed. Writers pulled the power back to themselves by moving into television. And actors who had been doing movies, who had looked askance at the television world—and I’m not part of that—started realizing that, actually, the great stories are now being told here. So they moved too. The breakdown of that strange barrier and snobbishness that there had been between American films and American television disappeared. And that’s when the floodgates opened.