Timothy Olyphant Got Real About The ‘Insane’ Experience Of Witnessing Real-Life ‘Machine Gun Fire’ That Crashed Onto The ‘Justified’ Revival Set

Look, I love Justified as much as you do. Top 5 show for me, really. Yet there’s still part of me that cannot help but hope that Justified: City Primeval arrived not only by the grace of Quentin Tarantino conversations but because of something that I’m totally imagining. I want to believe that Olyphant wanted to do revivals for both Justified and a certain Netflix show — which he vowed to keep showing up and filming even though the streamer cancelled it — and only one of them was possible, so he ran with it.

Yes, that’s silly, but I feel like Raylan Givens would appreciate that offbeat (and insurgent) sense of humor. On a more serious note, filming on Justified: City Primeval hit some dangerous hitches last year when real-life gunfire erupted from two vehicles that burst onto the Chicago set. Olyphant has had the opportunity to describe how things went down on that day, and this happened on Conan O’Brien’s very charming Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast.

By the way, there are few more pleasurable moments in talk-show history than when Olyphant and Conan have linguistically thrown down together. Let’s get to those podcast quotes, though. Via ComicBook:

“It went on forever. We started hearing cars, you can hear them driving and you realize they’re coming around the park, heading right towards us and there’s and if the gunshots and stuff didn’t already kind of give you a tip on what kind of people we’re dealing with, they completely ignored the road closed sign where it says filming don’t come this way. So they’re coming straight down the street that we’re on and they’re just you know this machine gun fire and it was just insane.

“I saw the first car go goes right by us I can hear the bullets hitting off the back of the car. Then the second car goes by, this muscle car… there’s a guy shooting a pistol out the window that’s clearly been modified and the other guys out the sunroof with a little machine gun and he’s shooting a machine gun. Those guys go by like 100 miles an hour …And then a third car went by and the crazy thing is then they kind of continued around the neighborhood.”

Fortunately, all cast and crew members were accounted for and safe after the incident. The production was, however, disrupted on a later date when someone tossed an incendiary device onto set. Has anyone seen Boyd Crowder lately There’s another bad joke, but fortunately, the season finished filming despite the chaos, and we can expect to receive Justified: City Primeval on FX sometime in Summer 2023.