When youâre all on set, do you have a sense of, Okay, this is a big one. Does everybody know that they’ve got to really bring their A game? Or does it just feel like a slightly longer day at the office?
Reading the script definitely felt like that. When you’re reading the script, you get to choose your own lenses, you get to see [and] feel what it’s going to be, and stitch it together cinematically. Even then, I already felt like it was going to be huge. When we got there on a day-to-day basis, it still felt massive. I mean, we got 500 people on set. We got hundreds of background, 50 or so stunt performers in full prosthetics. We have weapons being fired all over the place, just bullet casings all over the ground. And if there weren’t enough bullet casings, we had some young ladies in set dec[oration] going around like flower girls throwing bullet casings [mimics hand-motion] on the ground, green screens, all kinds of pyro. Even then on the day, it felt very big,
But because of Mark Mylod’s stewardship and Craig Mazin’s leadership, we just had a great plan. Nothing is impossible if you have the right team, you trust them to do their jobs, everybody takes accountability for their own job, and you just get it done. You just get it done moment by moment. Mark Mylod was the perfect director for this. He was able to capture the scope and scale of that huge, massive battle. Of course, he has a lot of experienceâGame of Thrones and other things in that vein. And also was able to be the sweetheart that he is, able to do all of the touching and heartbreaking momentsâhe’s just an incredible director.
On the day, it does feel big. But because of the team we put together, it didn’t feel impossible. We thought it may be, but it wasn’t. Still, even then, man, until it’s all put together, until Alex Wang, our VFX supervisor, gets his team on it, until [editor] Timothy [Good] cuts it all together, you never know. But now that it’s out and everybody has responded the way they did, we are very proud.
How does the collaboration with the stunt team work for an episode that big?
Well, first and foremost, I made sure that my brotherâI call him my brother, his name’s Ty Provost. He is of the Blackfoot Nation, and his familyâs from the Blood Res down in Southern Alberta. He’s from a family of stuntmen. His older brother Leonard and his eldest brother, Tim Bruised Head, are both very important in the stunt community in Alberta and all across Canada. I made sure that Ty was with me again, and thank you to Cecil O’Connor, our producer and Jacqueline [Lesko] and everybody who collaborates and makes sure that we get what we need to get the job done.
I knew I needed Ty, even if I was going to do a majority of the stuff. Ty is just good to be there to work through things, work through some of the fights, get stretched out, get limber, keep our trainingâwe train together, so we can keep our fitness at the level it needs to be. So it starts there with just my personal guy. I’m his actor. He’s not my stuntman. Then you have Marny Eng, our stunt coordinator, Danny Virtue, our horse wrangler, pulling all their team together. The amazing Glenn Ennis, who played the Bloater, used to be the rugby captain for the nation of Canada. He’s a very big man, and then even bigger when you put him on eight inch platforms and then even bigger when you put a helmet on him with a big antenna to represent where his head should be as the Bloater. A guy named Jonathan took a lot of burns for us. The whole team was just unbelievable. It basically just meant getting your weapons training in when you can and going and doing your riding with Danny out in the ranch, and going with Keanu [Lam], the fight coordinator, and tightening up all the beats of the fights.