Bass Reeves was an anomaly among Old West gunslingers. For one, the true-life figure escaped slavery to become the first Black US deputy marshal to serve in the territories beyond the Mississippi River. For another, though he made approximately 3,000 arrests in his career, he survived into old age and died of natural causes rather than suffering a premature demise at the fiery end of a criminal’s six-shooter.  In his obituary, The Shawnee Daily Herald of Oklahoma wrote: “Many are the strange tales told of his early days in the service against outlaws and desperadoes.” That legendary life will now be dramatized in Lawmen: Bass Reeves, a new series executive-produced by Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan.

David Oyelowo, who portrayed Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in the 2014 civil rights drama Selma, has wanted to play Reeves ever since that breakthrough starring role. “I can’t tell you how many times in shooting the show I just found myself walking into either a daydream I had, either as a kid playing cowboys when I was younger, or even as an actor in the eight years I’ve been trying to get this thing made,” he tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look. (Oyelowo’s interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike that restricts actors from discussing their work.)

The eight-episode series, which will debut on Paramount+ later this year, was created by showrunner Chad Feehan (who was unable to interviewed due to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike). Oyelowo’s journey with Reeves began long before Feehan offered his take, starting with a proposal from Face/Off and Hacksaw Ridge producer David Permut, who’s now one of the executive producers alongside Oyelowo and Sheridan. Despite being a self-professed Western fan, the British-born Oyelowo was unfamiliar with the true story of Reeves at first.

“I had no idea who he was,” Oyelowo says. “Within a very cursory Google search, I couldn’t believe I didn’t know who he was—and that a myriad of TV shows and films hadn’t been made about him already, considering the legendary nature of what he had done. That was the beginning of the obsession with trying to get it made.”

The history of Reeves is so vibrant that it has led some to theorize that he was at least partially the inspiration behind The Lone Ranger. “I’ve heard that too,” says director Christina Voros, a veteran of Yellowstone and its spin-off 1883, who helmed the first episode of Bass Reeves and four others. “I think the main reasons that’s attributed to him is he was such a remarkable shot, and that his posse man very often was Native American. It’s hard to know. So much is legend. I think Chad, knowing that there’s so much unknown, was able to find a balance between things that are true and things that are said to be true and things we would like to be true.”

Getting Bass Reeves off the ground was still a fraught task. “It’s been quite a circuitous journey,” Oyelowo says.

They first began trying to interest studios and networks in 2015. “Paramount+ didn’t exist at that time, and I think Taylor Sheridan was still trying to be an actor back then, so it was quite a while ago,” Oyelowo says. “We went out with the project twice over the course of about two to three years, and the first time around, the entire industry said, ‘No, we’re not doing that because no one’s doing Westerns.’ And then the second time around, the entire industry said, ‘No, we’re not doing that because everyone’s doing Westerns.’”

The project stalled for several years. Then Yellowstone happened, and the waxing and waning hunger for frontier tales became voracious. “Taylor came along and indisputably reimagined and reinvigorated the Western,” Oyelowo says. “I talked to him, and he is a real historian around this stuff. At that point, I’d been reading up on Bass Reeves for quite a while—and [Sheridan] was the only person I’d spoken to who knew at least as much, if not more, as I did. His passion for it just started making it feel like this might be a great collaboration. And then soon afterwards, Paramount+ expressed interest and we were off to the races.”

Over the ensuing years, Bass Reeves actually has turned up a few times onscreen, although never with as much singular focus as this show gives him. Delroy Lindo played Reeves in the fictionalized 2021 action Western The Harder They Fall, and Colman Domingo played him in a 2017 episode of the time-travel series Timeless. In 2019’s Watchmen, Jamal Akakpo played an actor playing Reeves in a 1920s-era silent film that features prominently in the superhero story, while Jaleel White spoofed Reeves in the comedic re-creation show Drunk History in 2015.

Many of those projects treat Reeves more as a pop culture figure than a historical one, and Oyelowo says the eight-hour run of his show allows time to more fully explore the nuance of the man—as well as the era in which he lived. “I truly believe his life was so sprawling and epic, I just don’t know that you could really do it justice in a movie,” he says. “All these things we’re talking about are things we really give context to as opposed to just touching on lightly.”

The series begins with Reeves’s life as an enslaved man, forced to fight alongside his owner (Boardwalk Empire’s Shea Whigham) on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War. During the war, Reeves ultimately escaped the control of colonel George Reeves, a Texas slave master. Oyelowo notes the irony that his path to becoming a lawman began with him breaking the law, such as it was at that time.

“His very existence questions the nature of justice. If we can now say that the enslavement of people was unjust, then freeing yourself from that unjust circumstance, can that truly be deemed unlawful?” Oyelowo says. “I think that’s one of the biggest themes of the show. This is all playing out at a time that in many ways defines who and what America is. We watch the birth of America, in a sense, through the personal eyes of one Black man and his family.”

That was a contradictory and sometimes confusing time for Black Americans, the actor says. “He found himself fighting on the Confederate side, so he’s already starting from an incredibly schizophrenic place, from an identity point of view. Then he escapes that situation and is living with Indigenous Americans and learns a lot of the skills that he goes on to apply to being a lawman from them, but also learns a lot about who he is outside of being enslaved.”

Reeves fled into the Indian Territory, land set aside for forcefully relocated Native tribes, where the laws of the United States did not reach. At least, not yet. It could be a harsh and unforgiving landscape, but Reeves was given shelter and aid by the Seminole: learning their languages, honing his skills as a hunter and tracker, and becoming an expert shot with a firearm. Once the Emancipation Proclamation legalized his freedom, he returned to his birthplace of Arkansas to become a farmer and start a family.

Lauren E. Banks (City on a Hill) costars as Jennie, Reeves’s wife, who provides his moral compass. “What I love about both characters is that love is very central to not only their relationship and their family, but thematically for them throughout the show,” Oyelowo says. “They go through some pretty rough patches—there’s no question. But that love is the magnet, and it’s really the reason for Bass to stay alive.”

A decade into his life on the family farm, the law came searching for Reeves again, this time as a recruit. Dennis Quaid costars as Sherrill Lynn, a US deputy marshal who urges Reeves to join his posse. “He’s someone this job has chewed up and spit out,” Voros says. “He throws himself into these battles hoping that he won’t make it because he’s seen it all and he’s lost it all. There’s a wild irreverence to Sherrill.”

Lynn, a fictionalized amalgam of other real-life lawmen who worked with Reeves, represents a kind of cautionary example of what life behind a gun can do to a person. “He’s not worried about doing the right thing or saying the right thing or being the right thing,” Voros says. “His state of mind has come from the horrors he’s experienced that have made him an angry, hateful person. So, he sets up very early on what this job can do to a person if one gives their life over to it.”

Judge Isaac Parker (Donald Sutherland) of Fort Smith, a true-life figure appointed to bring order to the Western territory as an influx of new settlers moved through, also sees potential in Reeves due to his knowledge of Indian Territory, which leads to Reeves getting a permanent badge and a whole new career.

Oyelowo describes an uneasy alliance between Reeves and Sutherland and Quaid’s characters. “It’s complicated because, if your relationship with white people for most of your life has been one in which you were enslaved by them, oppressed by them, marginalized by them, undervalued by them, that becomes something that inevitably you carry as a distrust,” the actor says. “Judge Parker is the one who deputizes Bass Reeves. So, on one hand, you could argue he gives him an incredible unforeseen opportunity. But on the other hand, there is this inherent distrust as to how much of this is for me, how much of this is for you?”

The show also explores the question of whether what’s legal is necessarily the same as what’s right. Oyelowo called Reeves “a very thoughtful individual who was very driven by the notion of right and wrong.”

“And in America at that time, the notion of right and wrong was incredibly gray,” he added. “A lot of his time as a lawman was trying to toe the line between what he felt was just and the law, and some of the hypocritical notions of what that was.”

What Reeves didn’t do, Oyelowo says, was run roughshod over the Native American tribes who lived on the land he was policing. He saw himself as much a protector as an enforcer, and respected the tribes and their traditions. “Our story explores the truth of one’s personhood being taken, and how Bass Reeves wrested that back not only for himself, but for an entire territory that he went on to be the most prolific lawman for,” the actor says.

In some ways, he was the only one willing to take on such a job. “The Indian Territories were so lawless and so dangerous, a lot of the white law enforcement refused to police it,” Oyelowo says.

Reeves was caught in the crossfire of the politics of that era in history. “I think he was confused by the idiosyncrasies and the hypocrisies of the law at that time. He was a Black man who was given the agency to bring to justice those who often felt that they were not committing a crime because they were doing it in the Indian Territory or they were doing it in the wake of the Civil War,” Oyelowo says. “In both circumstances, they felt ‘this land is mine to grab,’ or ‘these people are lesser than me.’”

That tangle of entitlement is part of what fuels the series, as it has in other Sheridan shows such as Yellowstone, 1883, and 1923—all of which explore the explosive clashes that can arise over notions of who owns and controls the land that all rely on for survival. “Our show really focuses on African Americans, Native Americans, and white Americans at that time. Two of those people had not that long ago come to the American continent—one group stolen, another group leaving what they deemed to be oppression—and then another group having their land stolen from them. That is why the West was so lawless,” Oyelowo says.

“Every one of these groups of people were coming from a place where they felt they had been done [wrong] and were seeking a kind of justice of their own,” he adds. “If you want to talk about a dramatic backdrop for telling a story, it doesn’t get more volatile than that time in this country’s history.”

Not everyone in the series sees Reeves as a good guy. Barry Pepper (True Grit, Saving Private Ryan) costars as Esau Pierce, the leader of the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles, whom Voros says becomes Reeves’s nemesis. “We meet Esau in the very beginning, and he and Bass are on the same side, not by Bass’s choice. But they’re fighting with the same army, and there is a connection that is made there that evolves throughout the series,” Voros says.

When they cross paths again years later, whatever old feelings or alliances that once existed get shunted aside as Oyelowo’s Reeves tries to play their new clash by the book.

Oyelowo emphasizes that Reeves was not the vigilante type. “He famously had over 3,000 arrests, but had less than, I think, 20 people that he shot and killed,” the actor says. “That’s not nothing. But within 3,000 arrests, it’s miraculous. I think that’s indicative of his desire to be fair, his desire to not abuse his power because he had been subjected to that as an enslaved person.”

He even believed in a kind of restorative justice, helping those who had committed lesser crimes atone and return to society. One such character in the series is a young Cherokee man named Billy Crow (The Revenant’s Forrest Goodluck), who is ultimately brought into Reeves’s own posse. “He is a dreamer who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and has to face the consequences of it. But Bass sees the good in him,” Voros says.

Reeves was motivated by a sincere kind of faith. The descriptions from the show’s creators suggest his personality aligned more with the forgiveness of the New Testament than the wrathful vengeance of the Old. “That comes from his own spirituality. It’s his way of doing God’s work,” Voros says.

“The notion of justice was very real for Reeves,” Oyelowo adds. “His goal was always to bring someone who had been accused or someone who may have been a criminal before a judge, so that the law can play out in a way that, regardless of whether it was imperfect or not, it was fair. Bringing someone to trial was far more his priority than someone being shot dead. That was very much a point of pride for him.”

“Pride” is something that comes across strongly from Oyelowo as he talks about the character. “I read pretty much every book on him I could get my hands on,” the actor says. “What was so admirable about him, in my opinion, is he was the height of grace because he refused to be the very thing that he had been subjected to—which is to basically project onto other people.”

He says Reeves was “not only disrespected by white criminals, whom he was bringing to justice, but by people who literally were incensed by the notion of a Black lawman.”

“He knew that these people were also products of their environment and products of a very specific culture, and I think he understood, ‘I am not going to give you a single excuse to dehumanize me, to underestimate me, or to deem me as something beastly,’” Oyelowo says. “He always approached those situations by taking the high ground.”