Raylan gets a new partner in (fighting) crime
Comedian Patton Oswalt joins the cast as Constable Bob Sweeney, on old classmate of Raylan’s.
“I wouldn’t call it a friendship; I’d call it a working relationship,” Olyphant says of the pairing.
On set, however, the alliance was much more chummy. “I can tell you that Patton Oswalt is money — I mean, that guy’s so good,” Olyphant says. “He makes it a little tough for me to get through a scene with a straight face and yet he’s so serious and fantastic. It’s just been a pleasure working with him.”
Raylan finds himself living above a dive bar and moonlighting as a bounty hunter
The Marshal who grew up surrounded by crooks has always tiptoed the line between being a “good guy” and a “bad guy.” That line gets blurred when he illegally takes a side gig to scrape together extra money for the baby he’s about to have with his estranged ex-wife.
“He seems to be walking right up to the edge now and then, and that’s kind of the fun of it — watching how close he can get to that without crossing,” Olyphant says of the rule-bending lawman. “There’s a fun game that happens now and again where others try to pin him down on who he is and what his intentions were or what would’ve happened had [a scenario] not gone exactly the way it did. Raylan refuses to allow that. That’s a fun character to play.”
Raylan as a dad
How will fatherhood affect the trigger-happy Marshal?
“I like the idea creatively, as far as storytelling’s concerned, of Raylan being a father,” Olyphant says. But don’t expect to actually see the character spending a lot of quality time with his child.
“Little kids on the set — they tend to be a pain,” Olyphant, a father of three, says. “And if they’re not, their parents are. So, I don’t see us having a kid on the show too much because no one wants to deal with that.”
And some things never change
As long as burgeoning crime boss Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) is around, Raylan is going to have his hands full in his hometown.
“You’re not going to get through the season without them hooking up,” Olyphant says of the show’s central antagonistic pair. “What we didn’t want to do is just keep it on the same scene over and over. We’re doing our best to try to keep the story both familiar but yet unexpected. Stay tuned.”
