Question: What can you reveal about your character's backstory?

Anson Mount: That’s a really interesting question -- particularly right now because Cullen’s back story is actually coming to the front light here in the last part of the second season. A lot of character revelations happen about Cullen and who he was and where he came from, and they’re not necessarily the things that you would expect.

It turns out that the Cullen Bohannon we think that we know is not the Cullen Bohannon that actually exists. And I can’t get into it more specifically than that.

I think if you come into a long-art dramatic show and you sort of slap down your back story, you’re not doing anybody any favors because more often than not, the writers don’t even know the full back story. They haven’t figured it out yet. So you can’t really do that and expect to work in a collaborative way. So I knew some generalities and then this season, sort of at the beginning, I needed to go back. Once I figured out really what the show wanted to be and where it was going, what it’s about, I needed to go back and do some rewiring of Cullen’s back story and so did the writers.

We just got to talking about it and it developed from there. You know, I will give you a hint that I think we figured out, starting this season, what the show wants to be about in the larger character way rather than a plot way. And the one word that I can say to you is "ambition."

Question: Can you tell us anything about how he may grow or change this season as a person?

Anson Mount: I think that the ongoing question for Cullen Bohannon this season -- and it’s repeated several times throughout the season -- is why is he here? Why has he remained? Why is he still with the railroad? And at a certain point, he thinks he knows what that reason is and maybe it has to do with one of the other characters and maybe it doesn’t.

And I think it turns out that that’s probably not the reason either. So he starts to be challenged in a lot of different ways by the characters in terms of what it is that he wants from his life on this planet and how he comes to face those questions. And it’s not an easy answer. It’s not a quick answer. As a matter of fact, it’s kind of a soul searching season.

Question: Would you say your charater has a devil may care attitude moving forward?

Anson Mount: I think he comes into this world already at that point when he has lost his wife and his child, and it’s sort of spinning out of control. I think it turns out that the men he’s hunting down and killing is actually a form of self-punishment as well.

And when he so clumsily kills the wrong man at the end of the first season, I think he’s to the point of just absolutely devil may care. Absolutely. If the Lord decides to take him now, or the devil, that’s just fine with him. He’s absolutely gotten to that point, to the extent that I think at the beginning of the second season, he’s actually quite delusional.

He ends up in a situation with some former Confederates that I think is completely delusional. And he finds himself eventually back in Hell on Wheels, and the inner monster that is what took him away from his family during the Civil War rears its head in a different way. The whole season I think is about defining what that thing inside of him is.

Why isn’t he running? It's going to turn out to be for reasons that are very deeply personal and have to do with the deeper motivations of the character, just like you find out starting second season forward in BREAKING BAD -- it’s a show about ego. You can’t do a show about cooking crystal meth for six seasons. It just doesn’t work. So it becomes a show about ego and everyone has their ego and they bump up against each other in different ways. In the same way, this show is about ambition and that’s what’s going to be the driving force of the drama going forward.

Question: Can you talk about Cullen and Elam’s relationship and the mutual respect they share for each other?

Anson Mount: I think it’s becoming the most interesting relationship in the series. We were very, very adamant at the beginning -- Common and myself and the writers  -- that we were not going to allow this to become Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder -- you know, the black guy and the white guy who are going to be buddies and everybody’s going to love each other.

We wanted to be very true to the tropes and the stereotypes and the conflicts at that time, particularly between a former slave and a former Confederate. And yet let them find themselves in situations where they have to meet each other on equal footing and situations where they end up needing something from the other person that’s purely practical and yet forces them to really listen to the other person.

I think we did a really good job with that in the first season, and I think we’ve done an even better job of it in the second season because you end up with the two men in sort of the same position. They’re both, in different ways, in charge of security in Hell on Wheels and you have a man who’s led men before and a man who hasn’t. And that doesn’t matter what color skin you are at a certain point. One has experience and the other one doesn’t.

Question: Is there going to be anymore boxing this year?

Question: Can you give me some juicy gossip about your love interest this season? What’s going to happen with you and Lily?

Anson Mount: You should know better than that. I can’t answer that question. [laughing] What can I tell you? Well, the ongoing interest between Cullen and Lily does progress this season. I can’t tell you to what extent or what happens, but, yes, there’s a continuation of that relationship.

Question: Is your story going to cross with Joseph Black Moon any more than it has so far?

Anson Mount: We’ve actually been talking about that and I haven’t really had a lot of interaction with Eddie Spears' character [Joseph Black Moon] so far this season, but there’s about to be a bit here in [Episode] 209, which we’re about to shoot.

Question: What can you say about the role of the Native Americans in the show this season? Is it only going to be adversarial?

Question: Is Cullen going to be involved a lot more with Colm Meaney’s character this season?

Anson Mount: Well, yes. Colm’s character is running the business that my character ends up working for. And he and I have two very different ideas, and so by necessity, we end up having a lot of head butting this season.

Question: What are your general thoughts on season one versus season two?

Anson Mount: The place where we start season two is so drastically different than the place we started season one -- several months have progressed, the railroad has progressed, Cullen has gone on this sort of almost suicidal mission with his former confederates, Lily and Durant kind of have come to an agreement in terms of their personal relationship.

So it did require a certain amount of dressing the stage in a way that I wish we hadn’t started so differently than the first season. But we did get to get right into the action of things. And once we laid the groundwork for where everybody was, it sort of springboards into some more interesting situations.

I think that the best thing I can say about the difference in season two to season one is that you now can really start to make some progress in terms of the development of the characters. I’d say that we’re definitely a more character driven show this season. Strangely enough, it’s led us into more interesting action because of that -- because now the action is tied into character growth and character reversal.

Question: Your character is consumed with rage pretty much at all times. Was that hard to walk away from at the end of a shooting day? And was it hard to return to after a hiatus?

Anson Mount: No, not at all. Sometimes I feel like I’m launching a one-man campaign to change people’s minds about what we do as actors. [laughing] I think that there’s this big misconception that actors sort of are these shamans who channel characters and emotions and that we are somehow mortally affected by our work.

I think there are a lot of actors that play into that because it makes them and their work seem more important. And it’s not the case at all. We play make-believe and I think it’s process of play. I think it’s a process of playing intelligently and playing well, but it’s a process of play.
   

And if I’m doing anything else, I’m not doing my job and I need to spend time in the loony bin. But, no, it was an enormous amount of fun for me and I continue to have a great time this season. I’ve been having a good time finding ways of lightening Cullen up a little bit because I think that we need to see different facets at a certain point.

Question: What are some fun things that happened on set?

Anson Mount: Just recently our schedule got off course because we had to go to Los Angeles to do the premiere. We ended up having to work on a Saturday and our line producer, Paul Kurta, and our writer for the episode, Mark Richard, pitched in and paid for an ice cream truck to come all the way out to location. We actually have photographs of this ice cream truck sitting in the middle of “Hell on Wheels,” and lots of extras in period garb going out to get a vanilla dip. It was pretty funny.

Question: Had you had much experience with horses and guns before HELL ON WHEELS?

Anson Mount: The best part of the job, really, is getting to ride a horse. I grew up in the rural South so I was comfortable on a horse, but I’d never operated a horse around a camera, which is a whole different skill set. Luckily we’ve got wonderful, good and experienced wranglers who were able to teach me the ins and outs of that.

And the guns? We’ve got an amazing armorer named Brian Kent who has a wonderful antique gun collection himself. He knows all about them. He can tell you anything you really want to know about any gun from the 19th century. We're pretty blessed with that.

Question: What is that pistol you usually handle on the show?

Anson Mount: The one in first season was a Griswold, which was Confederate-issued sidearm. This season, I lose that and I end up having to use a Union issue that was the 1857 Remington .45 caliber.

Question: How many seasons do you see this show running?

Anson Mount: I’ve heard five [seasons] thrown out there. I wouldn’t mind six. When you add together all the outlying projects that had to be completed once the rails were connected, it was a six year engagement.

There’s not even been talk about getting into the central Pacific side of the story and the whole contest between the two companies and the involvement of the Asian American workforce. And you just can’t build the entire story without getting into the central Pacific and that opens up a whole new bag of worms in terms of storytelling.

And we haven’t even started drilling through the Rockies. That’s part of the story. And then we’ve also been talking about a season set in Utah, which is a fascinating part of the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Obviously, the ongoing question comes down to where did Cullen go and end up in all of this. That conversation is ongoing.

I’m still fascinated by the fact that it was called impossible by almost every engineer on the planet and yet it was completed by a group of mostly uneducated men who literally, months before the project, had been either trying to kill each other or own each other. It’s an incredible setup for long-art television drama. And that gets right down to the greed and the corruption and the racism and the racial conflicts, the sexism. I mean, it’s just a wonderful, wonderful platform to look at how we developed as a nation.

Question: Would you want to do another Western?