Trivia / Justified

• Acting in the Dark: During most of season one, the audience was wondering if redneck racist Boyd Crowder had really Found the Lord and become a (fairly nutty) backwoods preacher, or was just scamming everyone. It turns out Walton Goggins, who played Boyd, didn't know either. In this case, the writers/producers did this to force him to play it ambiguously.
• Approval of God: Elmore Leonard liked Timothy Olyphant's portrayal of Raylan Givens and reworked the literary version of the character to be closer to the TV version when he wrote Raylan. His family also appreciated the show and it was his estate's idea to adapt City Primeval — considered one of Leonard's greatest works — into an installment of Justified.
• Actor Leaves, Character Dies: Kevin Rankin became a regular on Unforgettable, so Devil gets put out to pasture when he attempts to incite mutiny against Boyd.
• California Doubling: The show is set in Kentucky, but was mostly filmed in California (with some scenes shot in Pennsylvania).
• Corpsing: Famously, Timothy Olyphant has said that Danny Crowe's death scene in season five was so utterly satisfying and black comedy that he couldn't stop laughing almost the entire time they filmed the scene. Anyone who has seen season five knows he's right—it is the highlight of a rather poorly received season.
• Creator-Driven Successor: Amazon's Sneaky Pete, which features Graham Yost as showrunner, a lot of overlap in writers and directors, a similar decaying rural setting for Elmore Leonard-esque crime stories and a few Justified alums in the cast, most prominently Margo Martindale and Jacob Pitts.
• Dedication:
  • The series finale ends with a dedication to the people of Harlan, Kentucky, The men and women of the United Marshals Service and to Elmore Leonard who died 2 years before the show's final season.
  • "Brother's Keeper" ends with a dedication to (real-life) Deputy Marshals Derek Hotsinpiller and John Perry, both killed in the line of duty in 2011. After the events of the episode, it hits pretty hard.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • While filming the pilot episode, Walton Goggins kept the various temporary racist tattoos that the character Boyd had on during the entire time he filmed the episode in order to channel the disdain he received from strangers into his performance. Timothy Olyphant was not made aware of this until filming of the pilot began, when he invited Walt out for dinner and was horrified when he saw that Walt didn't have the tattoos removed after that day's filming wrapped.
  • While filming the final episodes of season 3, Timothy Olyphant was running a very high fever but decided to not delay production and filmed his scenes while sick. As a result Raylan appears extremely tired and world-weary in those episodes which fits neatly with the personal and professional problems the character is going through at the time.
• Executive Meddling: Walt Goggins was only supposed to be in the pilot and was killed off in the original script for the episode. Thankfully, once the series was picked up by FX, Goggins was signed up for the second half of the season and a new ending made showing that he survived, due to Raylan purposely missing Boyd's heart when he shot him in the chest. Considering how Boyd became the Ensemble Dark Horse insanely quickly, this is a good case of the trope.
• Fake American: Full-on Kentucky Nazi redneck Dewey Crowe is played by Australian Damon Herriman.
• Focus Group Ending: When the pilot was shown to focus groups, they loved the character of Boyd Crowder as portrayed by Walton Goggins and hated that he is killed at the end of the episode. Despite the fact that they tried to be very faithful to the Elmore Leonard short story the show is based on, a decision was made to reshoot the ending of the pilot and keep the character alive. The complicated relationship between the show's hero Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder then became the keystone of the show and was responsible for much of its popularity and critical acclaim.
• Production Posse: As a Graham Yost work, there are multiple actors from his previous work. Mekhi Phifer (Limehouse) was in Boomtown, while Neal McDonough (Quarles) and Scott Grimes (Seabass) were both in that and Band of Brothers.
• Real-Life Relative: Wood Harris and Steve Harris are, obviously, brothers in real life.
• Star-Making Role: Margo Martindale and Kaitlyn Dever's appearances in Season 2 raised their profiles and put them in constant demand in both TV and film productions afterwards.
• Throw It In!:
  • In Theo Tonin's first appearance, Arkin suggested that he wear a contact lens on his eye that gave it a glazed, glassy look; the next season, a backstory was written to explain this. This was also the reason for his extremely unexpected Season 5 appearance. Adam Arkin was directing, so it was decided that they might as well throw in an appearance by Theo to wrap up that storyline properly.
  • Raylan's accusation that Boyd wasn't really racist and was simply a con man who was pretending to be racist in order to gain flunkies was not in the original script for the pilot. It was added on the fly by Olyphant after talking to Walt Goggins and seeing how he was struggling with the racist monologue he had to recite during their characters first meeting in the pilot.
  • Dickie Bennett's weird hairstyle from Season 3 on is the result of Jeremy Davies turning up to set having cut his own hair.
• Underage Casting:
  • Adam Arkin, who plays Theo Tonin, is only 12 years older than Max Perlich, who plays his son Sammy and only 10 years older than Neal McDonough, who plays his adopted son.
  • Margo Martindale, who plays Mags Bennett, is only 13 years older than Joseph Lyle Taylor, who plays her oldest son Doyle.
• Wag the Director: Walton Goggins was able to score considerable creative control over his character Boyd, when the show's producers asked him if he would sign on for season one (with some additional sweet talking from Timothy Olyphant) after filming the pilot. In particular, the character's transformation into a repentant Born-Again Christian was Walt's idea (along with the notion that Raylan would not believe that Boyd had reformed).
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to the DVD for the season one finale, the original plan for the finale would have been for Boyd to visit the family of the white supremacist recruit that he murdered in the pilot in order to try and offer some form of restitution for the man's death. Raylan would trail him to Oklahoma in hopes of getting the family to help him trick Boyd into confessing to murder. Unfortunately for both, the family turns on both of them and tries (unsuccessfully) to kill them... with chainsaws.
  • There were discussions of doing a straight adaptation of City Primeval before the decision was made to rework the story into a sequel to Justified.
  • Damon Herriman pitched a Spin-Off centered around Dewey Crowe working as a PI that never came to be.

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