Amazon Prime’s new sci-fi/Western series Outer Range premieres April 15 and offers a return to television for Josh Brolin. Serving as an Executive Producer on the series on top of the star of the show, Brolin plays Royal, a rancher increasingly boxed in by a world that seems to be out to get him and his loved ones. When a crisis arrives on his doorstep, Royal struggles to figure out how to protect his family while also contending with a mysterious and seemingly endless pit that has appeared on his property.
Outer Range was exactly the right fit for Brolin, who has openly discussed his own history with ranching and whose love for sci-fi and fantasy extends far beyond his tenure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. During an exclusive interview with CBR at the red carpet premiere for Outer Range, Brolin reflected on what it was like to fuse two major elements of his youth in the series and why it matters to him to take chances as a performer.
CBR: In the past, you’ve spoken about not just growing up in a rural environment but also being a fan of science fiction novels. What was it like to marry those two elements of your youth into a show like Outer Range?
Josh Brolin: It was great, man. It’s like a regression for me. I got to play with this idea of… Sometimes [TV] can feel… That’s the problem with doing something like this is it can feel really cliché, or it can feel really generic, or something like that. We didn’t want to do that. I have no interest in doing that.
Not that I didn’t want to do TV. I just didn’t like the energy of TV, so that’s why I got away from it. Then I was willing to trade stocks instead. If I was going to act, I wanted to be afraid, and I wanted to feel like I could fail. I wanted to feel like I was going for something that wasn’t typical and that I wasn’t just kind of relying on a niche that people felt comfortable putting me in. So, that’s something that I like.
It doesn’t always work out, but with [Outer Range], this was a big swing for Amazon. I’m glad that they took the big swing. I think that their shows have been… I like some of their shows, but they’re more linear. I think this is something very kind of… This kind of puts them, if it works, in the echelon of HBO Max or Netflix and all that. I like those odds. You know what I mean? If you’re going to gamble, then gamble.
Outer Range, starring Josh Brolin, Imogen Poots, Will Patton, Lili Taylor, Lewis Pullman, and Tamara Podemski, premieres on Amazon Prime on April 15.
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