Horizon Star Calls Kevin Costner’s Western Saga a ‘Fat Novel’

Most Marvel fans will immediately recognize Danny Huston as X-Men Origins: Wolverine’s (2009) tyrannical William Stryker, who was utterly obsessed with collecting Mutant powers and applying them to his “uncanny” version of Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds). Today, Huston is coming off gripping performances in back-to-back Westerns, appearing in Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt and Kevin Costner’s “fat novel” of a film, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1. And during an exclusive interview with MovieWeb, Huston differentiated working on the two genre pieces by saying:

“I guess let’s start from a script from a point of view.
Viggo’s is a tight script.
It’s like the skin of a drum.
But his was told out of chronology and there’s a whole lot I haven’t really seen in a Western. It’s not linear.
Where Kevin Costner’s is a saga. It’s like a fat novel.
It goes through time.

It has many characters. It’s incredibly ambitious.
It’s a dream of his that he’s had for so many years.
He takes us through this long period of time. It starts at this Apache river crossing. You see how everything in that particular place starts to change.
Characters come and go.”

Huston, who won the Satellite Award (Best Supporting Actor in a Drama) for his work in The Constant Gardener and has been nominated for both a Screen Actors Guild Award (Outstanding Performance by a Movie Cast in the Aviator) and a Golden Globe (Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television in Magic City), continued to contrast Horizon and The Dead Don’t Hurt by saying:

“Where in Viggo’s film, you stay with the characters,
basically. It’s within this one place where we’re in.
In Kevin’s story, you may leave and never return again.
It’s like a novel.
It’s like a rich, gorgeous novel
that you just want to lap up and continue watching.
For me, it’s an extraordinary, majestic work that I celebrate.”

Danny Huston’s Delicious and Diabolical Villains

The Dead Don’t Hurt and Horizon’s Danny Huston is one of those actors who has successfully crossed over and appeared in both the big-screen worlds of Marvel and DC Comics. Years after portraying Stryker in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Huston slipped into the skin of the heartless Erich Ludendorff in one of the DCEU’s best movies, which is Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot’s creative cinematic collaboration, Wonder Woman (2017).

A very fine character actor, Huston seems to weave in and out of villainous roles with an incredible ease thanks to his mastery of the acting craft. And while discussing one of the two Westerns he recently participated in, Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt, Huston revealed to MovieWeb that he read that particular script “with relish.” Huston said during his sit-down:

“I read it with relish.
I knew that Viggo was involved.
I loved the way the script was written out of chronology,
out of order,
it created a sort of suspense.
I was delighted to come across the mayor, Mayor Schiller.
And in a way, he does fit the archetypes of a Western.

He’s greedy. He represents capitalism,
but in order to exploit. He also has to keep a certain calm.
You don’t really want things to get too violent.
Especially if they’re going to ruin the opportunities that he’s trying to create for himself.”

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Some of Danny Huston’s best performances include the aforementioned X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Constant Gardener and his recent appearances on the series Succession — not to mention his stint on Yellowstone. Fans of Huston can watch the actor work his magic in Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt, which is now playing in theaters. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 begins its theatrical run on June 28.