When Jonathan Majors read the first scene in the script for The Harder They Fall, he was immediately drawn to the character of Nat Love. The opening moments focus on Love as an 11-year-old child, when a man comes to his home and kills his mother and father in front of him. The man then carves a cross into the young Nat’s forehead, scarring him for the rest of his life.
“I wanted to be responsible for this kid,” Majors tells Vanity Fair. “That type of violation, that type of pain, it let me know that there was going to be a long road to travel emotionally to heal that. I really wanted to look after him.”
The Harder They Fall, which is now streaming on Netflix, follows Love 20 years later, when he gathers up his gang of loyal outlaws to take down crime boss Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), who has just escaped from prison. As the lead in this revenge Western, Majors creates a charismatic, skilled, and driven outlaw whose path will lead him toward a difficult choice while trying to avenge his family’s murder. For Majors, whose recent work includes Da 5 Bloods, Lovecraft Country, and Loki, The Harder They Fall showcases his abilities as a leading man, delivering both depth and charisma in creating a memorable character that isn’t often seen on the big screen.
Majors didn’t audition for the role but instead met with director Jeymes Samuel in person to talk about the Western featuring an all-Black cast. After their meeting, he sent Samuel two poems he had written, based on their conversations. “I really wanted to play the role, so I thought, I got to share this part of myself in the absence of an audition. I like auditioning because you kind of know what’s what. You’ve already interpreted the role in a way—no one’s putting it on you, you’re doing it. So, I needed some way of letting him know what my take on it was.”
It worked, and Samuel hired him to play the role of Love. While The Harder They Fall is a fictional story, some of the characters are based on real people, including Love, a cowboy who was formerly enslaved and who was a skilled horseman, going by the moniker “Deadwood Dick.” Majors began his research with Love’s autobiography, which was published in 1907 and is about 70 pages long. “You realize that it’s not just an autobiography, it’s also a slave narrative,” says Majors. “From that, I learned basic things: He’s from Tennessee, he was an ex-slave. But then in further research, you realized that he taught himself to read, which we take for granted. But none of us—I didn’t teach myself to read. I had teachers and family and books surrounding me. This man taught himself to read.”
Reading the autobiography also gave Majors insight into Love’s abilities. “He had an eye, and he could tell counterfeit branding, false branding from real branding,” he says. “So, the intellect of this man—he was actually a thinker.”
When it came to embodying this character, Majors took up one bad habit for the role: smoking. “It just does something to your voice,” says Majors. “I’m a baritone. His voice was deeper than mine, simply because of the cigarettes, the cigarillo smoke. So, that was a gradual shift. By the time we started to film to the time we ended the film, his voice was a lot deeper.”
Love’s relationship with Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beetz), his former lover whom he reunites with as he pursues Buck, is central to his character. “Mary makes him smile. That’s one of the things I was very conscientious about in the crafting of it,” he says. “You get the Nat Love grin, that wry smile that he can throw sometimes—that was found and developed through the relationship with Mary.”
He says that he tapped into the strong feelings that drive Love’s actions. “He has deep rage, he has his vengeance in him,” he says. “I felt the way I needed to play Nat—or the way I thought he was asking me to play him—is that fear had to be kind of at the forefront. Which is so anathema to the leader of men that he is or that I think he is.”
Majors had experience with horse riding from his previous movie Hostiles, but spent a lot of time with his horse, Cinco, to increase his abilities to be able to play a skilled horseman like Love. “Cinco was my biggest scene partner I was with every day. And so you could call it horsemanship, or you call it chemistry, being able to work with another being in that way. So, we had a lot of time together on the weekends to get safe with each other—to do the tricks, to do the stunts.”
He adds that there were plenty of stunts that didn’t make the final cut of the film. “I was excited because if they ask again, we have a whole bag of things we can bring to them,” he says, alluding to a sequel, and pointing out that the ending of the film clearly hints at another movie (Samuel has said he has always envisioned The Harder They Fall as a three-parter, with “a prequel and the sequel”). “It would be cool to do a sequel, prequel, whatever. I mean, I think what we’ve established, what Jeymes Samuel has established, is such a clear world.”
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