Timothy Olyphant

• 1. The Role He Refused

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  Timothy Olyphant once turned down the lead in a film that its studio was ready to approve if he said yes. The producer Neal H. Moritz recalled the studio's position this way: "If you can get Timothy Olyphant to play that role we will greenlight the movie." The film was a car picture then called Redline, and the part was Dominic Toretto. Olyphant declined. Vin Diesel took the role, the film became The Fast and the Furious, and it has produced nine sequels so far. Years afterward, Olyphant said he had assumed the project would be stupid and would flop at the box office.

  He is an American actor who has played villains, lawmen and, on occasion, himself. How does someone who passes on the keys to a franchise end up with a career this durable? Why do critics keep saying his finest work barely looks like acting? And what did a competitive swimmer from California have to give up, and to gain, along the way?

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• 2. From Pool to Stage

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  In 1986, a teenage swimmer from Modesto, California, reached the finals of the national championships in the 200m individual medley. His name was Timothy Olyphant. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on the 20th of May 1968, and his family moved to Modesto when he was two. His father, John Vernon Bevan Olyphant, was a wine executive, and his mother was Katherine, born Gideon. He had an older brother, Andrew, and a younger brother, Matthew. His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and both later remarried.

  His family tree has a famous branch. Cornelius Vanderbilt, patriarch of the Vanderbilt family of New York, was his paternal fourth great-grandfather. The Olyphant surname is Scottish in origin. Two of his ancestors, David Olyphant and Robert Morrison Olyphant, were both prominent businessmen.

  At Fred C. Beyer High School, he was more at home with a pencil than a script. He liked art and drawing, and the idea of acting embarrassed him. Peter Daland, the swimming coach at the University of Southern California, recruited him. On his recruiting visit he hoped to study architecture, but he was told the workload could not be managed alongside his training. He chose a Bachelor of Fine Arts instead and left one elective short of the degree. Three decades later he finished it, taking an online course during the COVID-19 pandemic.

  By 1990, he planned to complete the degree and apply for a master's in fine arts, though he only half-heartedly considered commercial art as a living. While working as a swimming coach at Irvine Novaquatics, he decided to try New York and explore other options. There he took up stand-up comedy. He described dabbling at first, then a six-month stretch of real commitment, with occasional returns afterward.

  Acting won out. In his last year of college, he had taken an acting class as an elective at UC Irvine and found it "really enjoyable". In New York he completed a two-year program at the William Esper Studio and began to audition.

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• 3. Villains and Supporting Parts

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  His first paid acting job, in 1995, was a WB television pilot based on 77 Sunset Strip. Phyllis Huffman cast him. He never met the show's producer, Clint Eastwood, who quit days before filming began.

  Later that year Olyphant made his professional Off Broadway debut in The Monogamist at Playwrights Horizons. It won him the Theatre World Award for Outstanding Debut Performance. In 1996 he starred in the world premiere of The SantaLand Diaries at the Atlantic Theater Company. The one-man play was based on David Sedaris' essay about working as a Christmas elf at Macy's. Ben Brantley of The New York Times found him charming at imitating other characters, but less sure with the running narration. Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News praised "all the drollery with a perfect deadpan and a twinkle".

  The First Wives Club gave him his feature film debut in 1996. He played an eager young director who tries to cast Goldie Hawn's character as an elderly mother. The CBS spy series Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which aired the same day the film was released, marked his television debut.

  Scream 2 was his most visible role of 1997. He played a film student later revealed to be one of the killers, and Chris Eggertsen of HitFix credited him with wild-eyed flair. Olyphant later called the part "a gift. I had virtually nothing on my resume at that point. I'm sure some of it was made up."

  A 1998 guest spot on the HBO sitcom Sex and the City made him a love interest for Carrie Bradshaw. Sarah Jessica Parker later named that episode, "Valley of the Twenty Something Guys", her favorite of the series.

  In 1999 he played a drug dealer in the cult comedy Go. Janet Maslin of The New York Times noted the offbeat flair, and Todd McCarthy of Variety called the performance deftly etched. The film's producer, Mickey Liddell, then offered him his choice of parts in The Broken Hearts Club. That 2000 romantic comedy followed a group of gay friends in West Hollywood. Dennis Lim of The Village Voice wrote that Olyphant was charismatic enough that his worst lines did not stick. The same year he played a detective in Gone in 60 Seconds and joked about the challenge of playing "second fiddle to a car". He had been set to star in Practical Magic, but Aidan Quinn replaced him.

  In the independent drama Coastlines, he played an ex-con who returns to his Florida hometown to collect a $200,000 debt, opposite Josh Brolin. It found no distributor until 2006. In 2003 he played a middling drug dealer in the action film A Man Apart, and critics singled the character out as the liveliest in it. He also joined the Stephen King adaptation Dreamcatcher as one of four friends attacked by parasitic aliens. Reviews of that film were poor.

  In a 2015 interview, Olyphant looked back on these years. He said he had passed on or failed to land parts that would have brought fame ridiculously fast, then ended up in supporting roles in the next film. Still, he felt he had gotten away with something, because he had worked for a long time without dealing with fame.

  The Girl Next Door in 2004 brought widespread praise. He played Kelly, a porn film producer, and at first he was reluctant to audition because the part resembled earlier roles. His manager answered: "as my manager dutifully reminded me, not many people saw those movies." Joe Leydon of Variety said he struck an impressively deft balance of hearty amiability and understated menace.

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• 4. Deadwood and Its Aftermath

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  Sheriff Seth Bullock, the lawman of HBO's western Deadwood, brought Olyphant to a wider audience. The series aired for three seasons, from 2004 to 2006. Matt Zoller Seitz of Vulture noted that Olyphant had been typecast as a talkative, funny bad boy. Deadwood let him play a righteous, brooding lawman instead.

  The show's creator, David Milch, explained the casting. He saw in Olyphant the same fire that Bullock carried, even at his most genial. Milch added: "Tim is a guy that doesn't let himself be known easily."

  Bullock began as the protagonist, but Al Swearengen came to dominate the series, as Emily VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club observed. She still called Bullock one of the show's most important characters. Matt Feeney of Slate described him as "laconic, feral, hot-tempered and a little vain". Jeremy Egner of The New York Times saw a capacity for explosive, nuanced acting that earlier roles had only hinted at. The cast was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble performance in a drama series.

  Olyphant himself says the show gave him more after it ended than during its run: "I'm much better at my job now because of the things I learned while doing it." He is harder on his own work. "Frankly, the show is much better than my performance," he said, praising a castmate named Ian who played with the props and language like a little kid.

  He had bought a house in the weeks before Deadwood was cancelled. He later admitted that his next job choices were made for "purely financial reasons". Both were action films released in 2007. In Live Free or Die Hard, he played a villainous cybersecurity expert, Thomas Gabriel. He and Bruce Willis have both said the part was underwritten, and he enjoyed building it up with Willis. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called him "a master at smiling menace". Manohla Dargis of The New York Times disagreed: "Mr. Olyphant has many charms, but annihilating menace is not one of them."

  He was hired to play the assassin Agent 47 in Hitman, a video game adaptation, six weeks before filming began, replacing Vin Diesel. He reluctantly agreed to shave his head. The film grossed over $100 million but drew negative reviews. Todd McCarthy of Variety suggested Olyphant should branch out beyond baddies.

  Before all that, in 2005, he had filmed the romantic comedy Catch and Release with Jennifer Garner. The two knew each other from their struggling days in New York. Stephanie Zacharek of Salon found him effective precisely because he seemed a little sharp and dangerous.

  Hitman changed how he chose work. He said it pushed him to take more responsibility, and he recalled asking himself, "What am I doing here?" In 2009 he played a morphine addict in the heist comedy High Life, and Derek Elley of Variety praised the performance as terrific. He also played a possible serial killer of fellow holidaymakers in Hawaii in the thriller A Perfect Getaway. That role earned him a nomination for the Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actor. In 2010 he played the town sheriff in the horror film The Crazies. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that he deserved a lead role to match his potential.

  On television, he appeared in 11 episodes of the FX legal thriller Damages as a morally ambiguous love interest for Rose Byrne's character. Byrne later called him her favorite guest star on the show. FX president John Landgraf then sent him the pilot script for another FX project, called Lawman at the time.

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• 5. Raylan Givens

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  Raylan Givens, the Deputy U.S. Marshal at the center of FX's Justified, is sent back to his native Eastern Kentucky after a questionable quick-draw shooting of a criminal in Miami. The series ran from 2010 to 2015. In Kentucky, Givens meets outlaws from his childhood, including his father and Boyd Crowder, with whom he once dug coal as a teenager. Olyphant said he was drawn to the character's ease, charm and old-fashioned quality. He does not consider Givens a good guy.

  The novelist Elmore Leonard created Givens. The character appears in the novels Pronto, from 1993, and Riding the Rap, from 1995, and in the short story "Fire in the Hole", from 2001. Leonard became an executive producer of the show and befriended Olyphant.

  Many television critics have called Givens the defining role of Olyphant's career. Brian Lowry of Variety named it "an unabashed star turn". Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle heard echoes of a younger Clint Eastwood in the steely gaze and matinee looks. Daniel Fienberg of HitFix wrote that the performance runs on potential energy, or potential violence, and that Olyphant does "intense and coiled" to perfection. Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe said he was riveting without a lot of noise.

  Olyphant was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2011. Even so, he and the show were often seen as snubbed by Emmy voters. Seitz of Vulture argued that this was because it was "the kind of performance that almost nobody recognizes as 'acting.'" Robert Bianco of USA Today made a similar point, saying the complete immersion masked the talent spent on it. Justified won a Peabody Award in 2011.

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• 6. Comedy and Cameos

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  The Office brought Olyphant a guest role in 2010 as a paper salesman, after Mindy Kaling, a writer and actress on the show, pushed for him. In 2013 he appeared on her own series, The Mindy Project, as a love interest. He had told Kaling he wanted to be on the show. Playing that middle-aged skateboarder, he said, he would have been happy to continue for "years".

  Voice work followed. In the animated film Rango, in 2011, he voiced the Spirit of the West, a parody of Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. Director Gore Verbinski cast him after overhearing him speaking on television. "That's our guy," Verbinski recalled thinking. Olyphant also voiced a character in an episode of FX's animated series Archer, and a sergeant nicknamed "Grinch" in the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

  In 2015 and 2016, he played a fictionalized version of himself on the Fox comedy The Grinder. Robert Bianco of USA Today called it an "Emmy-deserving performance". It won him the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Guest Performer in a Comedy Series.

  He returned to the stage in early 2016 for the world premiere of Kenneth Lonergan's comedy Hold On to Me Darling, at the Atlantic Theater Company. He played Strings McCrane, a self-absorbed country singer and actor who goes home to Tennessee after his mother's death. Ben Brantley of The New York Times found him "entertainingly irritating", and singled out the "startling, bona fide sorrow" in the final scene. Frank Rizzo of Variety called the performance a stunner.

  In February 2017 he began starring in the Netflix horror-comedy Santa Clarita Diet, alongside Drew Barrymore, and served as an executive producer. Netflix renewed it for a second season in March 2017 and for a third in May 2018. That third season was its last.

  In 2020, he played himself in a brief cameo on The Good Place, parodying his Justified character. He guest-starred in the tenth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the fourth season of Fargo, he played Dick "Deafy" Wickware.

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• 7. Off Camera

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  Alexis Knief, his college sweetheart, has been married to Olyphant since 1991. They live in Westwood, Los Angeles, and have three children.

  From 2006 to late 2008, he was the sports reporter on Joe Escalante's morning radio show on Indie 103.1 in Los Angeles. The film director David Lynch was the show's weatherman. Olyphant phoned in every weekday and delivered his reports in an unconventional style. When the station went off the air, he joked: "If you know of anyone looking for sports reports from an actor who is often just going off of what he recalls happened yesterday, or reading it directly from the newspaper, then I'm your guy."

  He is also a tennis player who has taken part in many pro-celebrity tournaments. In 2020 he co-hosted the sixth season of the Wondery podcast Hollywood & Crime, which covered the Billionaire Boys Club. He once returned to the stage for a single night, in Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays, a benefit for the Human Rights Campaign.

  He is a fan of the Los Angeles Clippers and the Los Angeles Dodgers. In 2013 he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at a Dodgers game.

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• 8. The Western Returns

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  In early 2016, HBO announced that David Milch was developing a two-hour film continuation of Deadwood. Production began in October 2018. Deadwood: The Movie premiered on HBO on the 31st of May 2019, with Olyphant back as Seth Bullock and also serving as an executive producer.

  That year he voiced Willard Stenk in the stop-motion film Missing Link, released in April. In July came Quentin Tarantino's semi-historical Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where he was part of a large ensemble and played the TV western star James Stacy.

  In 2020, he joined the Star Wars franchise in the second season of the Disney+ space western The Mandalorian. In the episode "Chapter 9: The Marshal", he played Cobb Vanth. He reprised the role in 2022 in The Book of Boba Fett.

  In 2023, he went back to Raylan Givens in the miniseries Justified: City Primeval, again as an executive producer. His daughter Vivian plays Givens' daughter in it.

  Deadline Hollywood reported that he had been cast as Kirsh in Noah Hawley's Alien: Earth. In 2025 he starred in that FX series. Two more miniseries, Lucky and The Five-Star Weekend, are listed as upcoming, in roles named John Armstrong and Jack.

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