American Primeval Brought Shea Whigham His Most Fascinating Character Yet
IF YOU STILL don’t know actor Shea Whigham by name, you almost certainly know his face. The 56-year-old has amassed nearly 100 screen credits in the 25 years since he made his big screen debut in director Joel Schumacher’s war film Tigerland. He’s appeared alongside the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage, Bradley Cooper, and
IF YOU STILL don’t know actor Shea Whigham by name, you almost certainly know his face. The 56-year-old has amassed nearly 100 screen credits in the 25 years since he made his big screen debut in director Joel Schumacher’s war film Tigerland. He’s appeared alongside the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage, Bradley Cooper, and his friend Colin Farrell. He appeared in cult classics (Take Shelter with another friend and frequent collaborator, Michael Shannon), Oscar-nominated films (American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, Vice, Joker), and big budget movies (several installments of the Fast & Furious series). Then there’s his work on the small screen, where he’s played unforgettable characters in prestige dramas like Boardwalk Empire, Perry Mason, and Homecoming and a handful of comedies like Danny McBride’s Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones. Whigham is one of those guys who can show up in anything and instantly make it better. He’s rarely the lead, but he owns every scene. And once you start spotting him, you’ll see him everywhere—and you’ll know what’s coming is about to be good.
During our conversation over Zoom, we primarily talk about his role in Netflix’s brutal new Western American Primeval, where he plays Jim Bridger, a real-life legend of the American West. But Whigham is a gregarious guy with a lot to talk about, so we touch on everything from current events to what we’re watching. I take the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite action movie franchises, Mission: Impossible. Whigham played Agent Jasper Briggs, an Intelligence agent leading the hunt of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, in 2023’s Dead Reckoning, and will appear again in this summer’s The Final Reckoning. I find my way in, just asking for the slightest single-word tease of what we can expect.
“Man, I can’t even go there,” he says, with an expression of both excitement and worry that he may wind up saying too much. And just when it feels like I’m about to get somewhere, the internet feed cuts out. But then it comes back. “It’s going to be great, ” he says. “It’s just going to be going to amazing.”
But then it cuts out again.
“I mean, I can’t–” he says, when he comes back one last time…before freezing again. By the time he’s back for good, the chance has passed. I’ll just have to wait to spot him again on the big screen and know that something great is coming. For now, we talk American Primeval, his first outing in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and the wide world of Shea Whigham’s many roles.
MEN’S HEALTH: Let’s dive into American Primeval. What drew you to playing the real-life character of Jim Bridger?
SHEA WHIGHAM: I just loved every second of trying to figure out Bridger. He was a Renaissance man. He was married three times, each to Native Americans; he was married to two Shoshone and one Flathead from the Flathead Nation. He spoke Shoshone, so their elders had to take him in. I think to this day he’s the most fascinating man I’ve had a chance to take on.
MH: This series is one of many in the last couple of years that really treats its indigenous characters with respect. I’m thinking of Killers of the Flower Moon last year as a story with similar subject matter. You get a perspective that you wouldn’t have gotten, especially in a Western, a few decades ago.
SW: I think you’re absolutely right. Fancy Dance was another [project centering indigenous people] that I was involved in. Treating it with the utmost and ultimate respect—that was always at the forefront of our minds when we were telling these stories. And I wanted to be a part of that. With American Primeval, we had experts in the field that were helping with the Shoshone language. We wanted to make sure we got this right.
MH: You’ve played a lot of law enforcement types in your career—in season 3 of Fargo, in the latest Mission: Impossible, even voicing Captain George Stacy in Across the Spider-Verse. Jim Bridger is the complete opposite. A man in a lawless frontier, making his own rule at his fort. How did you like that change of pace?
SW: I mean, I love those other characters. I loved Spider-Verse—I never saw it coming when they asked me to do that. And it turned out to be just a gift, man. But I love Bridger too. I love the way he’s trying to keep this fort together at all times. It’s a visceral feeling you get when you watch—at any moment in Bridger’s fort, there could be a death, there could be buffalo or bear brought in. Anything could be going on. So it was all very in the moment. And he’s a fair guy, that’s the thing. Jim has his own set of rules in the way he does things to keep this thing moving and to protect it. He’s fascinating to me.
MH: What kind of research did you put into finding out about who this guy was in real life?
SW: We went straight to Bridger’s bio, and we took everything we could find out about him. I knew he was from Virginia. I knew he followed Lewis and Clark out. I know that he came out in the fur trade and bought The Rocky Mountain Fur Company from Jedediah Smith. That’s where it gets really fascinating to be able to play. [Show creator] Mark L. Smith knows this world so well, and I would run everything by him. Mark and I were staying at this hotel in Santa Fe, and he would come over and we would just talk for hours about the character and about the 1850s. But then you have to transfer all of that information out of the head and into the body. And you have to be able to bring him to life. You can’t play research, you know what I mean? You’ve got to throw all that away, man, at some point. And you’ve got to just be in there with everyone.
MH: The show is billed as a limited series, but do you think there’s any chance of doing more?
SW: I would love to do more Bridger. Mark L. and I, we talk about once a week on how much we want to. He’s got incredible ideas for Bridger and where his story would continue on to. So I hope so, man. And I don’t say that lightly, because I usually don’t like to revisit characters. Once I’m done, I let them go. But Bridger is like Eli in Boardwalk Empire, or Preacher Theriot in season 1 of True Detective. I always wondered what happened to them. I think there are more stories to tell.
MH: Bridger seems to always be in control, no matter the scene, no matter who he’s opposite. What’s the key to playing that on the screen?
SW: Bridger knows he can walk in and read a room immediately. One of the keys, and I hope it comes through, is his humor. That was something Mark and I talked constantly on: Bridger’s humor, and the way he uses it to deal with people. The other is tat there’s an undercurrent of violence that could strike at any moment. And you want to feel that. So sometimes he’s using his shovel as a weapon, and sometimes his humor.
MH: I’ve talked to other actors who said changing their facial hair helps them dive into a character. You have a big beard in American Primeval. Did that help you to transform?
SW: It definitely helps once I get to that place, where I’m ready to add to the character physically. It’s always, for me, internal; you do all the internal work to get to the external. Right now, I have a mustache for playing [District Attorney Alex Hunter in Paramount+’s new JonBenét Ramsey series]. But I’ll tell you one thing that really locked me in: I started smoking on Bridger’s pipe. And I didn’t go anywhere without it. Unless I was sleeping, I had it in my mouth. And that really made a big deal. I miss it, actually.
MH: Little things like that that can really help.
SW: You’re looking for it, man. You’re looking. When I was a young actor and worked with Anthony Hopkins, I said, “How did you lock into Hannibal Lecter?”And he goes, “You know, actually, three days before filming, I didn’t have Lecter. And then someone in hair and makeup said to pull my hair back with a comb. And voila.” You never know where it’s going to happen for you.
MH: You’re always running from one project to another. How do you keep active and physically healthy these days?
SW: During American Primeval, when I was playing Bridger, I tweaked my knee pretty bad and I haven’t had time to get it fixed. So I do the sit-down bike and what I call a jailhouse workout: push-ups, sit-ups, some pull-ups, things like that.
MH: At the end of a project, is there a way you detox and de-stress and unplug? What do you do to keep your mind right when you’re moving from one thing to the other?
SW: Can I say drink?
MH: Of course.
SW: I’ll drink a great bottle of Napa Cab. And man, I’ll do a number of things. I will weirdly go throw dice, sit at a craps table, drink some, and let a character go before I have to jump head first into the next character. I’ll go to New York—I always love New York. I go back there and hit up some old haunts.
MH: You probably can’t say too much about Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. But I have a couple of questions about the previous one that you were in, Dead Reckoning.
SW: Man, okay….
MH: I don’t want to get you in trouble.
SW: Yeah, if I even say “no comment,” it’s in the headlines, “Shea Whigham Says No Comment.” Man, I don’t need that…. But I love Tom Cruise and [director] Christopher McQuarrie, so you ask me about the first one.
MH: Well, you have the unenviable role of playing a character who’s trying to keep up with Tom Cruise. What’s the hardest part of that?
SW: Beside the fact that he’s incredibly fast for his age? [Laughs] After MI7, I went into 8 with eyes wide open on what it going to be like. But whether it’s Mission or American Primeval or whatever I’m doing, I want to have an experience. And that’s what Tom and Chris allow you to have. That’s the amazing thing about Cruise: he loves making movies just as much now as he did when he was doing Risky Business. He truly loves it. So for me, man, every day of being around that was like gold.
MH: It seems like there’s real camaraderie among the cast on the set of that franchise.
SW: Oh, for sure. You become a family. You become like a traveling circus, you know what I mean? We started in Norway with the jump, and then we moved to Rome. So you’re all moving around together and then you’re in a hotel together. And Tom makes sure that we do a dinner and we talk. As big of a star as he is—and we are all aware that he’s number one on the call sheet—he ingratiates himself with all of us to form that dynamic. That starts at the top with him and McQuarrie.
MH: You also got to reunited with your old friend Michael Shannon for the upcoming limited drama Death by Lightning on Netflix.
SW: I think this was my eighth or ninth thing of working with Michael in both television and film. He’s a guy who takes it incredibly seriously. He loves the craft of acting. He’s one of my dearest friends, as is Matt Ross, who directed me in Gaslit and directed all the episodes in this. Then we brought in Betty Gilpin, and she’s a secret weapon. I mean, she was pregnant at the end of American Primeval, riding a horse in the snow. That’s what it’s become about—working with great people to give yourselves a chance to make great together. You never know what’s going to happen in these things ultimately, but you’ve got to have the right mix to give yourself that chance.
MH: And you’ve gotten to work with so many amazing people, from actors to directors to writers. Is there anybody you haven’t gotten the chance to work with?
SW: I think probably the best to do it is Meryl Streep. So let’s take her out of the mix, because she’s the greatest, she’s the Everest, you know what I mean? I’d like to do something with Gary Oldman. He’s still hungry. You can tell he’s still hungry, man. He’s breaking glass, man. I love it. And I don’t want to wax on, but the great thing about being an actor is that you can be 50, 60, 70, and doing the best work of your life. You can be Colin Farrell right now, doing arguably the best work in my age group. He’s one of my closest friends. I just finished El Pinguino, The Penguin, and if anybody’s doing better work than him right now, I don’t know who it is. And you never know when that’s going to happen for you—then you get a script from Mark L. Smith and a chance to play Jim Bridger, you know what I mean? So yeah, I’m lucky. It’s not lost on me, man.
About Author
