Timothy Olyphant Details Shooting On Set Of ‘Justified: City Primeval’: “It Was The Scariest Goddamn Thing. It Went On Forever”

For the first time since the incident occurred, Timothy Olyphant shared in great detail what it was like to experience the shooting on the set of FX’s Justified: City Primeval last summer in Chicago.

While recently guesting on the Conan O’ Brien Needs A Friend podcast, Olyphant described the fateful night when three cars smashed through the show’s barricades near the city’s Douglass Park and shot off what he believed were at least 100 rounds.

“It was the scariest goddamn thing,” Olyphant recalled. “It went on forever.”

The cast and crew of the limited series were accustomed to hearing gunshots, having already filmed in “bad neighborhoods” of Chicago, Olyphant told O’Brien. But this time, the stakes were much higher because trouble was heading right for them.

“You realize they’re coming around the park,” Olyphant said of the late night incident. “If the gunshots didn’t already give you a tip about what kind of people we are dealing with, they completely ignored the road closed sign where it says filming, don’t come this way.”

While most of the crew dove for cover, Olyphant said he managed to get a peek at the shooters in the second car. One leaned out a window with a pistol that had “clearly been modified” while the other stood up in the sun roof and fired a machine gun, Olyphant recalled.

“It was so frightening,” Olyphant said. “I assumed one was going to hit me. You’re just waiting.”

As Deadline first reported, Olyphant acknowledged that he grabbed a production assistant named Ashley and threw her out of the way. “The reason I know her name is that I apparently saved her life,” he told O’Brien. “It’s the weirdest thing, I’m wearing the Raylan [Givens] wardrobe standing behind this car. This is just like the show. It’s so weird. What am I doing?”

The actor went on to acknowledge that “we were a little understaffed” when it came to the presence of law enforcement. A week later, he managed to exchange stories with one cop who was on the scene that night.

He called it a “war zone.”

“He said it was one of the closer calls he ever had,” Olyphant remembered. “He said in those situations, they’re like us, they are going to take cover since [the bad guys] are shooting at each other with machine guns. Engaging in any way just becomes a bigger mess. It was f*cked up. It was definitely crazy. People will say I seemed really chill [in the moment]. That’s funny, because that’s not the way I remembered it.”

Olyphant also said it was he who spoke up the next day about potentially shutting down production. “We were supposed to shoot the next night in another bad part of town. I feel like I should speak up. I don’t want to shoot. I’m assuming the crew doesn’t want to shoot. That was the more emotional day.”

Planned for this summer, the eight-episode limited series Justified: City Primeval is a spinoff of FX’s 2010-15 hit Justified and is inspired by the Elmore Leonard crime novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. It takes place seven years following the end of Justified and follows Givens after he left Kentucky for his new home base in Miami. Viewers will find Givens balancing life as a marshal and part-time father of 14-year-old Willa, played by Olyphant’s real-life daughter Vivian.