9 minute read
Why 1883 Star LaMonica Garrett's Role Made Him a Cowboy to the Core
BY APRIL NEALE
In short order, LaMonica Garrett became a rough-riding cowboy for his breakout role as Thomas in Paramount+’s breakout hit, 1883.
Thomas is a laconic cowboy (formerly a Civil War veteran) who rides into the unknown with his partner Shea (Sam Elliott) and John Dutton’s great-grandfather, James Dutton (Tim McGraw). These men become the leaders of a slowly dwindling group of brave souls looking for a better life in the Oregon coastal valleys. To get there, they had to brave hostile Native American territories and swaths of desolate lands filled with bandits, mercurial weather, and lethal snakes hidden in the grass.
Paramount+’s 1883 is the origin story of Yellowstone’s Dutton family. In 1883, the Dutton ancestors are heading West with no idea what to expect, and this is showrunner Taylor Sheridan’s latest effort in the expanding Yellowstone mythology, filled with realistic narratives as well as the perspective of Thomas, or the story told through his costar, Isabel May as well as Thomas’s slow-building love interest with Noemi (Gratiela Brancusi), one of the immigrants looking for a new life.
Sam Elliott and LaMonica Garrett team up for a high stakes journey across the Wild West in 1883, The prequal to Yellowstone.
Emerson Miller/Paramount+ (C) 2022 MTV Entertainment Studios. All Rights Reserved.
This expansive POV was not lost on Garrett or how profoundly it influenced his performance throughout the series. “Some showrunners want to change things or do things just for doing it,” he says. “The idea is that I should be doing something when sometimes the best thing to do is take a step back and let the people you hired bring these characters to life and embrace each other. Taylor Sheridan knows that, and his words are so powerful. The script was just so amazing. Sam [Elliott] and I have to say these [written] words and be truthful about what we’re saying and where these words are coming from, and the rest will figure itself out.”
In Sheridan’s vision of 1883, Garrett’s Thomas was accepted as part of the norm for the times in America, fresh out of the Civil War and slavery. We know today that one out of four cowboys were African-American. However, Sheridan’s take on Thomas and Garrett’s interpretation of this complex Civil War veteran-turned-cowboy revealed a lesser-known history for audiences starved for veracity and fresh takes on a well-worn genre.
This realistic approach by Sheridan was not lost on Garrett, who devoted his Twitter feed in February to educating his followers on real Black cowboys who thrived out in the West. He says, “I grew up watching Westerns and what was so unique to me when I was reading the [1883] scripts was Thomas and Shea’s relationship. We hadn’t really seen that play out in the genre of television Westerns before. I love that Taylor never made references about him being a Black cowboy. It was just who he was. These were two guys, buddies, trying to make it in this frontier and get to the next day. Sometimes Thomas would reference his past, but he wouldn’t live in it and be all ‘woe is me.’ He got up, made coffee, and got the day going. That’s a part of his identity, but it was not who he was. And that was special to me.”
One of the most surprising facts about Garrett’s turn as Thomas is how inexperienced a rider he was before winning the role. Watching him in action as Thomas, he gives the impression that he has ridden horses his entire life. However, that is thanks to Sheridan’s “cowboy camp” training ahead of shooting. Garrett shared that the camp kicked his horsemanship skills into high gear. He says, “I had been on a horse before, but more like the Griffith Park single-file line, just walking behind each other while on a horse. But we went to cowboy camp for a few weeks, and that’s where all that stuff just started for most of us on the cast who had to ride horses, aside from Tim [McGraw] and Sam Elliott. They had been on a horse before. Most of us hadn’t been on horses. So for a little over two weeks, cowboy camp was necessary, and it paid off.”
Sheridan’s assiduous details and the historical accuracy of 1883 forever left a mark on Garrett. His interest in untold tales of African-Americans in the West is now his cinematic addiction. He says, “On my social media for February in the stories mode, each day I would post and write about African-American cowboys who helped shape the American West. We had 28 days of February, yet I could have kept going. There’s so much to tell that I would love to jump back into the saddle. You do one cowboy role sitting on a horse, and you’re in nature, filming and working. You tend to go back [to these roles] over and over. Robert Duvall talked about it, and Clint Eastwood talked about it. Tom Selleck talked about it. Once you’ve experienced that, it’s hard to go back to a studio and hit the mark with the AC going and everyone quiet on the set. I want to be back on a horse sooner rather than later. I don’t know when that’ll be, but this isn’t the last cowboy I’ve done on film.”
Sam Elliott and LaMonica Garrett
Emerson Miller/Paramount+ (C) 2022 MTV Entertainment Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Shea Brennan (Sam Elliott) is a Civil War veteran who later becomes a Pinkerton Agent. Early in the series, his family dies of smallpox. So he burns his home to the ground with the bodies of his wife and daughter inside.
Of LaMonica Garrett and his turn as Thomas, Elliott says:
LaMonica Garrett as Thomas of the Paramount+ original series 1883.
Emerson Miller/Paramount+ (C) 2022 MTV Entertainment Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Though the ending in the first season of 1883 sees Noemi and Thomas coupling and making it to the Willamette Valley, fans want more of his character. Garrett was unsure if Thomas would surface in 1883 again. But, he says, “I learned a lot from Thomas. It was a great experience, but you never know. I hope it’s not the last time we see Thomas. I’ve seen shows in the past where they get resurrected, or characters come back to life and other places. And in that world, there’s a world of flashbacks that could happen.”
Sam Elliott would have intimidated many novice horsemen actors, but not Garrett, whose admiration for the iconic star was intense. “The first day we met on the shooting range, he saw me, came over to me, embraced me, and gave me this big hug, and all the nervous energy I had knowing that I was about to be opposite Sam Elliott for a season was left right there on the range,” he remembers. Sheridan was a fixture at rehearsals and the camp, but he knew he had a winning cast by observing Garrett and Elliott together. Garrett adds, “[Sheridan] let us do our thing, and Sam and I figured it out. It was just so special to let it unfold how it did.”
The secret to 1883’s charismatic casting was that Sheridan fostered a familial structure for the actors on location. Elliott and Garrett shared quarters with Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, and others in the cast.
As Garrett says, “I think being away from home, away from our environment, for us, our happy hour, our home, our family was each other because we were all pulled away from everything we know. It all started with cowboy camp. We had this ‘us against the world’ kind of mentality. We’re all learning together. And right from cowboy camp, it rolled into us filming. And many places that we went along this journey every few weeks, we’d pick up and move to a different part of Texas or Montana or Oregon or wherever it was.”
Noting that in most of these locations, cable, wifi, and cell service were negligible or completely missing, he adds, “When we would wrap, a handful of us stayed together in a cabin–Sam, Tim, Faith, Gratiela, Isabel, Audi, and Audi’s mom. In Montana, we would come back to the house where we shared the common area living spaces. We ate together. And on the weekends, we would all hang out together and watch movies together. That’s all we had. In Texas, we were in Guthrie at the Four Sixes Ranch. We’d all wrap at the same time at night. And there was this big, long table in the main house where we got our food and talked about the day, the following scenes, about life. This was our family for six months. And there was so much humility and kindness, no egos or big-timing. Tim and Faith are super icons, and Sam is a Hollywood icon. You wouldn’t know who the stars and celebrities were if you were just a fly on the wall watching us. So that’s a tribute to all of them. I kept telling some of the younger actors who hadn’t worked a lot before, ‘Soak this up. This may never happen in our lives again, and it’s so special what’s going on right now.’ I think that’s the feeling that we all had while doing this. That’s why 1883 turned out so well on screen.”
