‘Ransom Canyon’ star on being sent to ‘cowboy camp’ for the Western: ‘No one got kicked in the face’
He’s an Irish cowboy.
Actor/director Eoin Macken stars in the new Netflix Western drama “Ransom Canyon,” premiering April 17.
“Irish people generally don’t go abroad to go to cowboy camp when they’re younger,” Macken, 42, joked exclusively to The Post.
He added that he didn’t feel that distant from the cowboy world, even though it’s American iconography.
“But I feel like there’s actually a large history of some Irish [people] in some of the older Western movies, where actually there’s Irish immigrants who seem to populate and float as they traveled,” the actor said. “I’ve ridden horses a lot on other shows and stuff, so I was quite comfortable with that. And, I grew up watching those type of movies.”
“Ransom Canyon” is based on a series of romance novels by Jodi Thomas. The story has a central love triangle involving rancher Staten Kirkland (Josh Duhamel), dance hall owner Quinn (Minka Kelly) and Staten’s rival rancher, Davis (Macken). The characters also have to deal with various threats to their land, as well as personal and work issues.
“The interesting thing about that love triangle concept is that everyone’s the important part of their own triangle,” Macken told The Post.
“So for Davis, I think that the most important thing about him is that he sees everything he’s doing from his own point of view as being the right thing to do. But he is also quite complex and does have a dark side,” he shared. “There’s good and bad elements of his behavior and his personality, which inevitably come through in anybody’s situation, no matter how much they try and pretend they don’t exist.”
Macken, who starred as Sir Gwaine on the BBC fantasy series “Merlin” and in the NBC medical drama “Night Shift,” said he was drawn to “Ransom Canyon” because he liked the idea of being in a “different sort of exploration” of the cowboy genre.
About his past roles, he said, “Merlin’s my favorite show I’ve ever done, mainly because I’ve had so many of my good friends on that show, but also, that show has been so well received, and so many fans have been incredibly kind. Even when I was working in Australia a couple of years ago, I did some comic cons, and people still really care about the show.”
He joked that on “Merlin,” since he was playing a medieval knight, it prepared him for “Ransom Canyon” because he learned “what not to do” while riding horses.
“I’ve had the experiences on ‘Merlin’ of being put on the horse, and the horse bolting and just having to hold on for dear life while they filmed. So on [‘Ransom Canyon’], I was like, ‘alright, these cowboys are more controlled than the knights!’ ” he quipped.
Macken said that “Ransom Canyon” really did send the actors to “cowboy camp.”
“We did it for the first month before filming … We did a lot of wrangling, these cute little cows, and also how you kind of steer them, and you guide them with the horse and work together to kind of basically corral them.”
He said there were no mishaps during that time because the actors all took it seriously.
“We’re all actually quite good. Everyone really wanted to try … so no one got kicked in the face by a cow.”
