Sam Elliott has spent a lifetime embodying the American man on screen. Now, he’s not sure there are many left.
“You look at the current climate, it’s hard to find, from my perspective, who most represents the American man that I would look up to,” Elliott tells The National. “It’s pretty dark out there.”
But at 81, Elliott isn’t ready to give up on the country he loves just yet. It’s what gets him out of bed in the morning – and what has brought him back to work after three years away.
“I’m more hopeful now than I have been for quite a while about where we’re headed,” he says. “And I find that hope in the American people. Things come around.
“What we need to do is talk to each other. We need to stop hating each other. And I think that’s not just in this country – that’s a worldwide problem. It’s pretty simple.”
Just as Elliott struggles to find role models in the real world, he says it has become harder to find them on the page as well. More than 50 years into his professional career, he is acutely aware of what his persona signifies – and careful about how he uses it.
“It’s one of the reasons I turn a lot of work down,” he says. “In a lot of the work I get offered, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to represent anything I could be proud of.”
That changed when television creator Taylor Sheridan – best known for Yellowstone and 1883, in which Elliott starred – sent him a text asking what he had been up to.
“I’ve been dealing with some medical issues and not doing anything – staying close to home and enjoying my family,” Elliott says. “He asked, ‘You’re working?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘How come?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I just haven’t seen anything I wanted to do.’ And he said: ‘Well, I’m about to put your butt back to work.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.”
Sheridan was referring to Landman, his contemporary oil-industry drama, which broke streaming records in its first season. The series stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, a land manager turned executive.
Months passed before Elliott had any idea what role he might play.
“I kept telling Taylor: ‘I’ve got to see something, man,’” he says. “I have total faith in Taylor, but I’m one of those guys who’s got to see it in black and white. What are they going to ask of me?
“And finally, he sent me a couple of scenes – the first two scenes in the first two episodes. And I thought: OK, I’m in.”
As audiences have learned over the course of the second season, which airs its finale on Sunday, Elliott plays Tommy’s father, TL Norris – a character who has become the moral anchor of the series. He arrives in the aftermath of his wife’s death and, in one particularly moving scene, wonders aloud whether there is still a piece of her goodness left within his son.
“It’s just a pure gift,” Elliott says. “That’s become the most overused term in my vocabulary over the last few years since I met Taylor. I’ve had a lot of gifts in my career, and I don’t think any of them are richer than this one.”
Landman season two is available on Tod streaming across the Middle East
