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Stardom for Anson Mount? Fine, but on his terms
When first sighted, Cullen Bohannon is in Washington, D.C. He is a man of few words and piercing, haunted eyes. A Confederate soldier in the just-concluded Civil War, he now has unfinished business of his own: avenging the death of his wife.
"Did the war take her?" someone asks Bohannon, to which he tersely acknowledges, "Sump-em li-kat."
So he heads west to work on the transcontinental railroad and settle some scores at the Union Pacific construction camp.
That, in a nutshell, describes "Hell on Wheels," an epic new AMC drama taking its title from the term for the movable community that will accompany the drudgerous laying of track through fierce frontier. It is here in this transient world of harsh nature, brute ambition and clashing personalities that much of the action will take place in the series, which premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. EST.
It stars Colm Meaney, Dominique McElligott, Ben Esler, Philip Burke, Eddie Spears and rapper-actor Common, as well as Anson Mount in a role that maybe, just maybe, will launch him into stardom.
Or maybe not. Either way, the 38-year-old Mount professes not to care.
Raised in a small town in Tennessee, he says he grabbed the role of Bohannon because "it's hard to find Southern characters that are not stereotyped or vilified or aggrandized. And this managed to escape all those traps.
"As a Southerner," he adds, "you grow up with at least an inkling of what it's like to come from a conquered culture, and that's an important part of this character."
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