Graham Yost is coming off a critically acclaimed second season of "Justified," built around backwoods mafia mama Mags Bennett, a role that won Margo Martindale an Emmy. But she won't be back -- he killed her off. So you can understand the question that's frequently posed to him heading into the third season: Was it crazy to kill off Mags?
"Well, it wasn't so tough letting the character go, because I didn't really know where else we were going to go with Mags," he told TheWrap. "It felt that with two of her sons dead and another one going off to prison and her probably looking at time, it just … I just didn't know where we would go," says Yost.
"I was just terrified of treading water with her or going back and repeating ourselves. And also, a show like this can't just keep accumulating bad guys. We've already got Boyd (Walton Goggins). He's our in‑house antagonist. So I don't regret killing off Mags. What I do regret is just not having Margo on the show, in that she's such a tremendous actress and such a great person. That was the hard part."
With season three premiering on FX tonight at 10/9c, Yost talked to TheWrap about the new direction for the new season, the fun of bringing author Elmore Leonard's characters to the tube, and making a return trip to space with his "From Earth to the Moon" collaborator Tom Hanks.
Also read: 'Justified' Season 3 Preview: Raylan and Boyd, Working Together? (Video)
Season two was so incredibly intense and fantastic. How did you start breaking out the story for this season, after ending it on such a crazy high?
Well, as I like to tell people, the background on my computer … for many months it has been a photograph that Sarah Timberman, one of the other producers on "Justified," took of Margo (Martindale) backstage at some event giving me the finger. So any time I turn on my computer that's what I see, Margo just flipping me the bird. (Laughing)
Listen, we all regrouped and gnashed our teeth and said, "What did we do? Were we crazy to kill off Mags?" But we also knew that it was good to contain that within a season. Fred Golan, who is the number two on this show, he said, "Let's look at each season as a book. There's one big story, lots of little stories, but one big story." Last season the story was about the feud between the Bennetts and the Givens. So we wanted to conclude that.
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Then this season we just had to come up with a new book and a new story. We've been borrowing stuff from Elmore (Leonard)'s new novel "Raylan," which he wrote partly just to give us something to "hang up and strip for parts," as he says.
