You likely know Timothy Olyphant best as Raylan Givens on “Justified” or Seth Bullock on “Deadwood,” but in 2015, he took on a very different role: himself.
The “Santa Clarita Diet” star went full meta on Fox’s sitcom “The Grinder” — a one-season wonder that ran for 22 episodes from 2015 to 2016. The short-lived series starred Rob Lowe as Dean Sanderson Jr., the star of a long-running courtroom drama also titled “The Grinder,” who thinks his TV lawyer experience qualifies him to practice actual law at his family’s real-life law firm. Olyphant appeared in four episodes as an exaggerated version of himself.
In the show, Dean’s legal drama gets revived with a spin-off titled “The Grinder: New Orleans.” The fictional Olyphant plays Rake Grinder, the brother of Dean’s character, Mitch Grinder, putting Olyphant and Dean at odds. During an appearance on “Conan,” Olyphant joked about the preparation required to play himself. “A lot of times, Conan, you just show up and you say the lines. I should probably feel guilty about this,” he said. “But this role, I really have been researching it for years.”
Timothy Olyphant won a Critics’ Choice Award for playing himself on The Grinder
Timothy Olyphant’s scene-stealing turn on “The Grinder” earned him a 2016 Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Guest Actor/Actress in a Comedy Series. The actor also joked on “Conan” that, unlike other characters he’d played, this one was particularly tough to switch off. “People will say, ‘Oh, how do you do it when you go home?’ Like, when we were shooting ‘Deadwood’ or something, it’s like, ‘Oh, does that come home with you? Is that hard to kind of brush that off?’ I said, ‘No, it’s a piece of cake.’ But this one, it did. It came home. It’s hard to shake it.”
Olyphant also recalled a complication involving his character’s romantic storyline. The fictional Olyphant strikes up a romance with Claire (Natalie Morales), an attorney at the Sanderson family’s law firm whom Dean is also interested in. “I said, ‘Well, this is a little bit of an issue because I’m playing Timothy Olyphant and Timothy Olyphant’s been married for 25 years,'” Olyphant recalled telling the producers. Worried the storyline might imply that he was having an affair, he asked his real-life wife, “Are we okay with this?” Her response: “Tim, nobody takes this sh*t seriously.”
Other reviewers took notice of his performance, too. Paste highlighted his work as one of the best in history by actors playing versions of themselves, while USA Today said he was worthy of an Emmy nomination.
This story originally appeared on TVLine
