HELL ON WHEELS - COLLIDER: Anson Mount on Hell on Wheels, ‘Praying’ for a Western, and Finally Landing a Manly Role
By Joel Keller
11/18/11
On the new AMC series Hell on Wheels, Anson Mount plays his kind of guy. Not in the sense that he's particularly fond of ex-Confederate soldiers (his character fought on the wrong side of the Civil War and is now on a quest to avenge his wife's death), but in the sense that he's bearded, grungy, slightly immoral, and roaming the Western frontier. We spoke with Mount about why the character appeals to him, what he's learned about Reconstruction from doing the show, and why he was "praying" for a Western...
... Q: What did you find out that you didn’t know before?
Anson Mount: "I definitely did not realize that the transcontinental railroad was the engineering feat of the nineteenth century. Once I read Stephen Ambrose’s Nothing Like It in the World, I realized there really is no arguing that. Everyone said it was impossible. When Lincoln said we were going to do this, everybody laughed; it was like Kennedy saying we’re going to put a man on the moon. Then [Lincoln] died and was martyred and Congress got behind it and federal subsidies kicked in, and you had all these out-of-work soldiers that needed to do something. Slowly people started to realize it could happen, then it captured the nation’s imagination..."
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