If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if Justified, The Exorcist, and Nashville walked into a bar and started a band, The Bondsman is your answer. Kevin Bacon plays Hub Halloran, a dead bounty hunter who crawls back from the grave with a grudge, a guitar, and a haunted past. Jennifer Nettles—yes, of Sugarland and Righteous Gemstones fame—plays Maryanne, his ex-wife and possibly future musical partner. And yes, they made a whole damn album as their characters. It’s called To Hell And Back and it’s somehow both fictional and totally not.
“I went into it blind,” Bacon says. “Didn’t even know where the season was going. No director, no cast. I just read the pilot and told Jason Blum, ‘I’m in.’” Because that’s what you do when Jason Blum texts you. It’s called job security.
For Nettles, who’s been politely declining every “can you just play a singer in this?” role for a decade, this one finally made the cut. “I was like, it’s gonna take something really special,” she says. “Because if I do it well, they’ll say ‘she’s just playing herself,’ and if I do it poorly, they’ll say, ‘wow, she can’t even fake being a musician.’” So, a real win-win.
Turns out, the magic wasn’t just in the script. Bacon and Nettles wrote the songs themselves—as their characters. That’s not method acting, that’s next-level fanfic with a recording budget.
“The first song we wrote was ‘To Hell And Back,’” says Bacon, “and Jen sent me this verse and I was like, ‘Alright, this one’s done.’” It helps that Nettles casually drops lines like “I ain’t Johnny / you ain’t June / but I’d go to hell and back for you.” Meanwhile, most of us are out here rhyming “money” with “honey” like it’s still 1957.
“Kevin is a fantastic songwriter,” Nettles says, clearly meaning it, which you can tell because she doesn’t say “for an actor.” And he returns the favor: “We didn’t cast her because she could sing—we cast her because she was the right person. That she can sing and write is just… perfect.”
They wrote the songs from their characters’ perspectives. “It was like going back and asking, ‘Who was Hub when he was 25?’” Bacon says. “As an actor, you think about backstory. But I’d never written one into a song before.”
Some of those songs made it into The Bondsman. Others got the boot. “Multiple songs got rejected,” Bacon says. “Which, to me, is a good thing. It means we weren’t just cramming them in because the star wanted a moment.” Those left behind found a second life on To Hell And Back, which is kind of poetic for a show about resurrection.
“It’s born from this world,” Nettles says, “but it can live outside of it.” In other words, you don’t need to watch the show to dig the record—but if you do, it all hits deeper.
The music leans Appalachian and Irish, sometimes hymnal, often haunted. “It’s got a lot of minor Irish folk DNA,” Nettles says, name-checking “Woe Death” and their harmonies on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” as high points. You know, just your typical demons-and-dustbowl-folk bangers.
There are whispers of a live show—Bacon popped up with Sugarland in Austin for a one-off—and if the crowd size was any indicator, people are more than ready to go to Hell And Back with them. Your move, Ryman Auditorium.
And for the record, Bacon’s Southern drawl in the show is surprisingly convincing. “I was lucky,” he says. “Jen and Beth Grant were in my ear, and we shot in Georgia. All I had to do was get in the van and listen.”
It’s not every day a TV show gives you plot, pathos, and a playable record—call it prestige television with a B-side.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
