The American West never stops being re-imagined, mostly because it never stops being myth. Michael Hirst, who already spun swords and longboats into prestige TV with Vikings, now drags outlaws and immigrants through the mud with Billy the Kid. He insists the dustier the research book, the better. “I kind of like rather boring historical books,” he says. “The dusty and drier the better. I pick up things from footnotes—the little traits historians don’t regard as important. That’s where you find glimmers of character.”
Donald De Line, who produced Spielberg’s neon-drenched Ready Player One, liked the whiplash of suddenly being elbow-deep in cattle and revolvers. “That’s what I love about this business,” he says. “We get to go into different time periods and different worlds. I’d always had a fascination with Billy. Making a western was new territory, and to work with Michael—who makes everybody else look bad—was a huge draw.”
The western endures because it’s myth, not history. Hirst is blunt: “Star Wars is a western. Myths tell truths. Billy is a modest Catholic boy, but he bestrides the world like a colossus.” De Line picks it up: “It’s the classic conflicts—good and evil, building a new world. Ours is a pre-western, before the west was even formed. A society’s being built in front of your eyes.”
Which is how you get a show where a homesteader can’t hack it, falls into depression, and wanders into a doctor’s office for the 1870s version of mental health care: “It’s in your head.” Hirst laughs: “Probably the first time the audience has seen a depressed cowboy.” He even wanted to slip in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a prescription—“a man who understood the immensity of America”—but that darling got cut. “Still, you picked it up,” he says, when reminded of a star-gazing monologue that felt ripped from Whitman. “I got it in there subtly.”
As for Billy himself, Hirst started with clichés and came away with someone almost saintly. “His sensitivity, his morality, his beautiful singing voice, the fact that people who knew him tended to love him. His identification with the Mexicans. His mother taught him to read. He said he didn’t want to be famous for killing people. When he said he was more sinned against than sinning—I could confirm that.”
It helps that Tom Blyth, who plays him, can emote more with his eyes than most actors can with a monologue. “He does so much by doing so little,” Hirst says. “He can be still on screen and you get it all behind his eyes.”
The series plants its feet before the Lincoln County War, which Hirst is already writing into season two. Three seasons is the plan, though history—or legend—offers more than one possible ending. “Yes, I read Billy was reputed to have been shot by Pat Garrett,” he says dryly. “We’ll see where that goes.”
Until then, there’s Jesse Evans, a swaggering foil who Hirst calls Billy’s “doppelganger on the dark side.” The archetype is familiar: the older, cooler guy who takes more risks and drags you into trouble. “They love each other, they need each other,” Hirst says. “They each have chances to kill the other and can’t. That’s the push-pull.”
Even the mud was intentional. Director Otto Bathurst refused to use Calgary’s prefab western towns—“they didn’t exist when Billy first came west.” So they built settlements from scratch, small and primitive, clinging to the edge of a hostile landscape. “Sometimes beautiful and awe-inspiring, sometimes harsh and unwelcoming,” De Line says. “But always real.”
If Hirst is right, Billy’s truth—his contradictions, his ghosts, his music—was always there, just buried in the footnotes. He just had to dig it up.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
