English actor Tom Blyth chats about taking the reins on his first Western TV series, Billy the Kid.
Cowboys & Indians: Congratulations on your performance in the title role of the Epix series Billy the Kid. For openers, you passed the first test with flying colors: You look comfortable on a horse.
Tom Blyth: [Laughs.] That's good. That's the bare minimum of what I need to do.
C&I: But how difficult was that for you? You grew up in Birmingham, England, a long way from the Wild West. And your résumé doesn’t appear to include any previous westerns—or even any period pieces that called for horseback riding.
Tom: This definitely is a first for me. Actually, my first ever job was as Feral Child No. 5 in the Robin Hood that Ridley Scott directed 10 years ago. I was supposed to ride in that—but they ended up never putting me on a horse. They ended up making us these Hobbit feet out of prosthetics. So we were all running through the forest. But the fates were aligned that I was supposed to ride a horse. And now, 10 years later, I got there in the end. But I hadn’t really ridden before. I mean, I’d ridden twice in my life, really. The first time was when I was very young, at nine or 10 years old. And I fell off, and I was traumatized.
C&I: Wow.
Tom: I think if you speak to anyone who learns to ride, they’ll tell you that if they fall off early on, it can be quite a traumatizing experience. However, I got back on a horse when I was about 18, when I was doing a play in Saudi Arabia. And that was also a fairly scary experience, because the horse wasn’t very well trained. It was a young horse and young horses obviously have a lot more energy and tend to be less patient with their riders.
C&I: But when you’re cast in a western — well, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, right?
Tom: Well, when this job came around, I was living a slightly nomadic experience up in the woods of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. It was still the height of the pandemic, and so I was living with my girlfriend at the time in this little cabin in the woods. And we were chopping wood every day and keeping the fire going. It was very Walden Pond-esque. So, when I got the job in Billy the Kid — luckily, I knew someone down the road who had a ranch, and who rescues these wild mustangs from the kill pen down on the Southern border. She has about a dozen wild mustangs that she has taken in, and these horses have varying levels of PTSD themselves. She looks after them, she brings them back to full health — and then she trains them and uses them to help people with PTSD, like veterans. So she’s a very good person to teach you to ride, because she’s very patient.
I went there and said, “Look, I need to be good on a horse. I need to look like I know what I’m doing. I can’t embarrass myself.” And bless her, she taught me to ride in three weeks before we started filming. And when I got to the location, we were surrounded by real cowboys, because we were filming in Canadian cowboy country in Alberta. And I mean, it was so authentic. The minute I got there, they put me on a horse and I rode off for three hours in the plains with six cowboys around me. I felt like I was part of a posse. It was incredibly authentic.
C&I: How difficult is it to play a historical figure when the facts of their life have been clouded by so much legend and romanticizing?
Tom: Well, in this first season, it was really important for us to show that he’s not immediately a sociopath. He’s not a psychopath. He’s not a born killer, because I don’t believe that anybody is. I think it’s circumstantial. I think you grow up and people are damaged and hardened by the world that they grow up in. So what [writer-producer Michael Hirst] and I really talked a lot about was who he is versus who he becomes. I think Michael has plans for three seasons right now, but he has to have an end point. Because — spoiler alert — at some point, Billy dies. Who will he be then versus who he is now? I think that’s what the show is about: seeing him become this man, this killer. That’s what’s so interesting about it. And that’s something we haven’t seen before. Usually, in the movies that have come before this, we see him as he already is. We haven’t gotten to see the origin story, so to speak, before now.
Find out how to stream Billy the Kid at epix.com, and learn more about Tom Blyth here.
Illustration: Heather Gatley
From the July 2022 issue
