Timothy Olyphant has had an extensive film and television career, appearing in a number of beloved and iconic projects, but as it turns out, even with the actor appearing in a number of fan-favorite and well-regarded projects, we all might have been saying his name wrong this whole time. Olyphant is now starring in Justified: City Primeval where the actor reprises his role as Raylan Givens, recently appeared on The Rich Eisen Show and revealed his last name is actually pronounced “All-iphant” rather than “Oh-lifant”.
“By the way, technically? All-iphant. I’m on a run right now where I’ve decided I’m gonna… honestly, I feel like I have let it slide and I’ve created a problem. My dad gets upset,” Olyphant said before explaining that his father gets upset when he hears his children saying the last name as “Oh-lifant” instead of the other pronunciation.
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Timothy Olyphant is Back as Raylan Givens
Now that the pronunciation situation has been handled, fans can get excited for the return of Olyphant’s Raylan Givens in FX’s Justified: City Primeval. The series is a follow up to Justified, which aired for six seasons between 2010 and 2015. For Olyphant, coming back to play Raylan Givens after eight years away really wasn’t too big of a challenge. In the same interview, he noted that it was such a familiar situation, it made the entire experience comfortable.
“It was that old ‘Wasn’t it just yesterday?’ kind of feeling,” the actor said. “It’s just such a comfortable place to work from, and then there was something really refreshing about it because there was so many new faces. It was just that perfect amount of familiarity, and then totally foreign at the same time.”
What Is Justified: City Primeval About?
Here’s the official synopsis for Justified: City Primeval:
“Having left the hollers of Kentucky eight years ago, Raylan Givens now lives in Miami, a walking anachronism balancing his life as a U.S. Marshal and part-time father of a 14-year-old girl. His hair is grayer, his hat is dirtier, and the road in front of him is suddenly a lot shorter than the road behind. A chance encounter on a desolate Florida highway sends him to Detroit. There he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent, sociopathic desperado who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once and aims to do so again. Mansell’s lawyer, formidable Motor City native Carolyn Wilder, has every intention of representing her client, even as she finds herself caught in between cop and criminal, with her own game afoot as well. These three characters set out on a collision course in classic Elmore Leonard fashion, to see who makes it out of the City Primeval alive.”
Quentin Tarantino Had a Surprising Hand in Justified: City Primeval
According to showrunners Dave Andron and Michael Dinner, Olyphant and Tarantino had a conversation about Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval that changed everything.
Dinner explained, “One day the phone rang and it was Tim Olyphant who said, ‘I’ve been sitting on the set with Quentin, and we were talking about this book, City Primeval. We thought it would make a great year of Justified.’ So, we started kicking around the idea, and FX was into it. It was very complicated to put together because the rights situation was a little murky — part of the rights belonged to the estate, part belonged to MGM which was going to make this movie several times, and it took a while to get it going, but then we did.”
“We thought we ended it well, and we thought we were done. We thought we rode it into the sunset, and some series, you don’t get to do that — they pull a plug and you don’t get to feel a sense of completion and you regret the fact that you couldn’t end it the right way. We thought we did,” Dinner continued. “We never intended to go back into the waters. But there was this book, City Primeval, which is kind of a crown jewel of Elmore Leonard’s work. It was his first Detroit crime novel and that kicked off his becoming the preeminent writer of American crime fiction.”
“A lot of people had wanted to make this book before. It almost got made by [Sam] Peckinpah years ago as a movie, and [Quentin] Tarantino wanted to make it as a movie, and a lot of people wanted to play with it in television, streaming or cable,” he mentioned. “We had a great experience doing Justified, and some years later Elmore’s son had approached me about doing it as its own thing. I’d always loved the book, we always referenced it when we were in the writers’ room on the original series, and so that was the intention: It was going to be its own thing.”
