TV Week TV Week

By Kate O’Hare © Zap2it

As the 2012 Calgary Stampede winds down, work continues on the Transcontinental Railroad, or at least the version being built in the fictional world of AMC’s Sunday sophomore drama “Hell on Wheels.”

“It’s hot right now,” says star Anson Mount, calling from the Alberta, Canada, city, “and we’re dealing with the mass confusion that is Stampede.”

Mount plays Cullen Bohannon, a former Confederate soldier trying to escape his haunted past. He has become attached to the traveling community of vice and corruption that follows the Union Pacific Railroad workers as they march across the country on the way to meeting the Central Pacific Railroad and linking the two coasts of the recently reunified nation.

Along the way, Bohannon has forged a link of his own with biracial emancipated slave Elam Ferguson (Common). They may have come from different worlds in the former Confederacy, but their fates are intertwined as the now United States of America struggles to remake itself.

“In a lot of ways,” Mount says, “it’s the most interesting relationship in the series. Cullen ends up having a position for the railroad that Elam covets, and it’s interesting watching how the writers have Cullen deal with that.

“He doesn’t face off with Elam directly. He’s led men before, and Elam hasn’t. He realizes you don’t lead a man by beating him into submission. You lead a man by letting him choose when he comes around and then slowly allow him to take the reins of his own destiny.