‘Hap and Leonard’: Inside TV’s New Pulp Fiction Buddy-Comedy
Joe Lansdale will bust that ass,” says Michael K Williams, his face turning serious. “Don’t get him twisted.” Sitting across the glass conference table, British actor James Purefoy nods. “Have you seen his fights on YouTube?” he asks. “On set, we’d just ask him how to do the right moves.” It’s mid-morning in SundanceTV’s sleek wood-and-glass offices in Manhattan, and Williams and Purefoy — stars of the new southern noir series Hap and Leonard, based on Lansdale’s novels and premiering tonight on the cable channel — are describing the three months they spent shooting down south with the 64-year-old East Texas author. “Poison oak, poison ivy …” Williams trails off. “Copperhead snakes, spiders, gators,” Purefoy finishes. “One guy got bit by a brown recluse and ended up with a hole the size of a golf ball in his shoulder.” Williams shakes his head: “Joe will fuck you up.”
Lansdale’s novels are raw, outlandish, and always centered in rural East Texas — and Hap and Leonard does it best to bring his world to the small screen. The show is based on 1989’s Savage Season, the cult writer’s first novel about a happenstance crime-fighting duo: straight white ex-hippie Hap Collins (Purefoy) and gay black conservative/Vietnam vet Leonard Pine (Williams). They meet while working blue-collar jobs — rose fields, bouncing bars, etc. — in the meth-lab poor wilds of 1980s East Texas, bonding over that most common of rural denominators, hard-luck poverty. So when Hap’s ex Trudy (Christina Hendricks) saunters back into the skeet-shooting picture with a quick-rich scheme involving $1 million buried at the bottom of a river, the pair decide to try their hand at private investigating — and soon find themselves in a mess of cops, gators, neon-clad killers and a band of backwoods revolutionaries.
Rarely, if ever, has a show been set in East Texas. (And technically, neither is this one – they shot it in nearby Baton Rouge.) A region of dense pine forests, humid swamps, and bible-belt dry counties, the Pine Curtain is a completely different world from Hollywood’s typical depictions of the Lone Star state – more Yoknapatawpha County than Cormac McCarthy. This is where the South meets the West, a unique gumbo of Stetson-wearing independence and cotton-plantation slave legacy, and nobody nails this culture like Lansdale, the son of a Nacogdoches auto mechanic. In over 40 genre-bending novels that run the gamut from horror to western – pumping out one or two a year – he has used the piney woods as a backdrop to explore small-town people in outlandish situations: a unique talent adapted twice for film in 2002’s Bubba Ho-Tep and 2014’s Cold in July. (Peter Dinklage also has Lansdale’s novel The Thicket under development.) “I grew up in small-town Pennsylvania and always liked stories that don’t have metropolitan polish,” says Hap and Leonard‘s writer-director Jim Mickle, who also helmed the latter Texas noir starring Michael C. Hall. “Joe has a great way of capturing stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into any box or specific genre.”