Kayla Wallace, Colm Feore talk filming ‘Landman’ in ‘crazy’ Fort Worth weather
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‘Landman’ Season 2
Get ready for the second season of the hit Paramount+ show with exclusive interviews and coverage from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
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In “Landman” season 1, Kayla Wallace’s and Colm Feore’s characters found themselves at odds.
Wallace plays Rebecca, a big city lawyer sent to West Texas to help with a lawsuit around a plane crash. Feore plays Nathan, one of Tommy’s (Billy Bob Thornton) housemates and a lawyer for M-TEX Oil.
The duo sparred a few times throughout the season about how to handle certain legal issues, but ultimately were drafted together by Tommy to help him as he steps into his new presidential role with the company.
“We’re playing catch up a lot of the time, trying to find out where the bodies are buried, what details need to be really closely examined to keep the thing afloat,” Feore said.
Ahead of Sunday’s premiere, Wallace and Feore spoke with the Star-Telegram about season 2 storylines and the experience of filming in Fort Worth.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Star-Telegram: I wanted to start with first season’s success. It was one of the most-watched seasons of television last year. What do y’all make of that?
Kayla Wallace: It’s wild, the success and the love that this show has received. I mean, I felt in my gut it was something special from the moment I read the first script way back when I was auditioning. But to see the amount of people that have come up to me and say, “I love that, my parents love that. It’s a show I can watch with my partner.” It’s out of this world, and we are so grateful, because we want to keep making it.
Colm Feore: Well, it’s really cool. The first season, Taylor had written all 10 episodes, so we could read beginning, middle and end. We knew where everything was going. That gave us a remarkably secure foundation on which to build all the characters. We knew what the relationships were like, we knew the direction he wanted to go. He was writing, producing and directing. We had Christian Wallace, our co-creator, who did the “Boomtown” podcast, with us all the time. The details of where we were in West Texas were always precise and specific, so we could stay true to all that.
At the core of it, you’ve got Billy Bob [Thonrton] as Tommy, as the world’s every man and King Lear rolled into one. I mean, it’s the worst day ever, always. When he turns around at the end of the day and goes, “How much worse can it get?” It gets worse. I found people coming up to me saying, “I have days like that. My family’s like that. My life is like that. I get it. This is where I live.” We hit the nail on the head on so many different levels, both from their curiosity about a real oil and gas world, about boomtowns. About the kind of crazy stuff from half naked gals serving coffee at 3 a.m., to the Patch Cafe that doesn’t have dinner, because nobody stops for dinner.
People who work really hard, and work shift, recognized all that and thought this is really happening. Young people with not a lot of education were making $180,000 risking their lives. But also buying houses and having families, and then having to cope with this terribly dangerous job, and dealing with their lives and families. To see the fallout of all that, and to see this managed by one guy, who will drive all over Texas with phones and radios and explosions. I think it was that wonderful confluence of very specific detail about how the world of oil works, teaching the real world how this works, and that was entertaining enough. Then the people are pretty compelling. Led by Billy Bob’s Tommy.
S-T: Monty (Jon Hamm) dies at the end of the first season, leaving Tommy and Cami (Demi Moore) in charge of the company. Tommy drafts your characters to join him in combating whatever comes next. How do those roles change in season 2?
Wallace: There’s a new dynamic of these two needing to work side-by-side to save this company. We start off in episode one, you kind of see that the company’s on shaky ground. Everyone’s underestimating Cami in this new role that’s not really new, because this company was hers, but she wasn’t very much involved in the day-to-day operations. Tommy is doing that. It’s a lot of pressure and there’s a lot of risk involved, and Cami is gonna do what she can to keep her company alive for her husband. We’re all the soldiers that are gonna help her fight for that.
Feore: We’re playing catch-up a lot of the time, trying to find out where the bodies are buried, what details need to be really closely examined to keep the thing afloat. We don’t have all the information. We’re constantly trying to get it so that we can answer Tommy’s questions, and we can be there for Cami when she has questions, which she does, in terms of the day-to-day. That has forced us into this collaboration with two very different areas of expertise, but they’re both required. In this particular instance, we need all hands on deck. I think it offers us a wonderful opportunity to check our egos at the door and try to figure this thing out.
S-T: You guys have spent the last two seasons living and working in Fort Worth. I’m curious, what has the experience been like?
Wallace: Fort Worth reminds me of where I grew up. It’s very casual in the way people are really friendly. You can wear sweatpants out for dinner and no one’s gonna be upset with you. I love that. It was nice to sort of go back to the same restaurants and try out some new ones. It felt a little bit like home this year, because we spent so much time there last season. I really liked it. It was my first time being in Texas in August, though. That’s not for the weak.
Feore: I would find myself doing kind of surgical strikes, depending on when they needed to me in the script. I would fly in, fly out, spend a couple of days. Massed a lot of points, both in the hotels and air miles, which have been enormously useful. Then just tried to get the weather right, which I very rarely did. I would layer up thinking, that’s the smart thing. Have six or seven layers and the plane door would open, and I would be blown back in from the heat and humidity. You think you get it right, and then midday, it’s 99 degrees. Then it’s 6 a.m. when we get up to go to work, and it’s not 90 degrees then, it’s really chilly.
Wallace: You might be dealing with, like, sideways rain coming at your face. The weather is crazy. You guys in Fort Worth, I don’t know how you do it.
Feore: Because we have to stop, if there’s lightning. If there’s lightning and thunder we have to stop work, because none of us can be anywhere near the lighting instruments for 30 minutes after the last lightning strike. We’re tools down and we all sit huddled.
In fact, the first year, Kayla’s parents came to the set for their first time seeing her working. They all come out to the set, they are driven out to the set, flown in from Canada. It’s fantastic. We were out of this M-TEX house that we rent. We’re all in there, we get 150 crew, and all of the actors are there. We meet the parents, they’re delightful, of course. So excited to see her work. It starts to thunder and lightning. Tools down. Okay, we got 30 minutes. Then another lightning at 29 minutes. Then another lightning at 29 minutes. They wouldn’t let us out of the house. They wouldn’t let us go for coffee. We were stuck in the tiny room with her parents for nearly five hours.
Wallace: My dad was like, “Is this what acting is? You just sit around and chat?”
Feore: The crew were stuffed into the living room, I think they were watching a movie. As somebody described it, it was lightning and thunder, or the worst cast party ever [laughs]. There we were 250, stuck in this house, doing absolutely nothing. That’s one of the drags. In consequence, in season two, we took our house and built it in a studio, so we’d have a lot more flexibility.
“Landman” season 2 premieres Sunday on Paramount+.
