Justified: Timothy Olyphant Reveals Details About Shooting on Revival Set, “It was F–ked Up”

Production on FX’s upcoming revival series Justified: City Primeval was interrupted last year when actual gunfire forced the show to stop filming. Reports at the time said that two cars broke through the set’s barricades while engaged in a rolling gunfight. Speaking in a new interview on the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast, franchise star Timothy Olyphant recounted what he called a “long-winded dramatic story” about the shooting that took place and what actually happened. According to the three-time Primetime Emmy nominee, filming was taking place in the early part of the morning when they began to hear gunshots across the park from them, eventually finding its way to the set.

“Its the scariest god-amn thing,” Olyphant said about hearing the distant gunshots “It went on forever. We started hearing cars, you can hear them driving and you realize they’re coming around the park, heading right towards us and there’s and if the gunshots and stuff didn’t already kind of give you a tip on what kind of people we’re dealing with,  they completely ignored the road closed sign where it says filming don’t come this way. So they’re coming straight down the street that we’re on and they’re just you know  this machine gun fire and it was just insane.”

The actor went on to reveal that people on the crew were shedding their safety vests to make themselves less visible, with others diving under cars to get out of the path of the gunfire. He continues, “I saw the first car go goes right by us I can hear the bullets hitting off the back of the car. Then the second car goes by, this muscle car… there’s a guy shooting a pistol out the window that’s clearly been modified and the other guys out the sunroof with a little machine gun and he’s shooting a machine gun. Those guys go by like 100 miles an hour …And then a third car went by and the crazy thing is then they kind of continued around the neighborhood.”

Olyphant went on to say that the event was “fucked up” and compared it to “a war zone.” In the end though, the day after the shooting was “more emotional” than the night of the gunfire itself. 

“I was supposed to shoot the next night and again in another bad part of town,” he added. “I remember thinking ‘I don’t want to go to work;’ I was like I’m not sure I want to… I called the producers and I said ‘You know I feel like I should speak up you know because I don’t want to shoot and I’m assuming the crew doesn’t want to shoot. Should we be taking a beat?’ And that was the more emotional day when you realized when they came back and said ‘Yeah, I think you’re right I think we need to shut down.’ That’s when all of a sudden you’re like, okay, now there’s like tears coming down.”

Justified: City Primeval doesn’t yet have a premiere date, but Olyphant has already noted it may not be the last of Raylan Givens.