Andy Garcia Says He Improvised The Putting Scene In ‘Landman’ & Even Ordered A Custom Putter Just For It

Does this count as good improvisation? Or is it just a smart way to expense a new golf club?

After taking a couple of episodes to show up in Season 2 of Landman, Andy Garcia’s villainous Gallino character has made his presence felt in Episodes 3 and 4. Fans will likely remember that the last episode of Season 1 dropped Andy Garcia into the Landman universe, and that choice got a whole lot of people pumped to see him in the antagonist role.

In case you didn’t know, the part of Gallino was written specifically for Garcia.

When the actor sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss how he landed the role on Landman in the first place, he described it much like how Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Hamm have. Taylor Sheridan envisioned Garcia in the show, and then he made it happen:

“My agent said, ‘Taylor wants to meet you. Will you fly out to Fort Worth to meet him?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ So I went out to his house. He wanted to talk to me about this part he wanted to write for me. We talked about our past, catching up on our history in the business. He happened to be a big fan of a film I did many years ago called ‘8 Million Ways to Die.’

And that was really all that it took.

So far, it’s seemed like the perfect fit. Andy Garcia brings a certain gravity to the role, and the scenes that he and Thornton have shared thus far have been entertainment and drama gold. While the 69-year-old actor was on The Rich Eisen Show last week, he explained his involvement in Landman as a blessing:

“It’s a privileged situation to be in, and it’s a lot of fun to play with that cast and that writing is beautiful.”

From what it sounds like, Garcia has fit into the cast perfectly, and he’s already managed to get on the good side of the show’s higher ups.

How do I know that? Well, Taylor Sheridan famously doesn’t like much improvisation in his shows (more on that in a bit), and Garcia has already managed to work some improv into his role just a few episodes in. The actor said that in Episode 4, which aired this past Sunday, there was a mention of golf, and that sparked an idea:

“Taylor – in episode four – he had written this thing in a monologue where Billy comes to my office and basically says something to the effect of, ‘You can pretend you play golf at a country club, but I saw you kill a man in front of me… I know who you are.'”

The acting veteran saw that as an opportunity to add some depth into the scene that wasn’t written into the script.

Garcia called Scotty Cameron himself (if you are familiar with golf, that’s a huge flex) and arranged for a special putter to be made so that he could use it in the scene:

“I saw that, and I called Scotty Cameron, and he made me these Napa putters, which is the putter that Ben Crenshaw kind of made famous. The old Wilson 8802 from the 60s (that Arnold Palmer) used and stuff.

He made me that putter, and so when Billy comes to see me, I said, ‘I’m gonna be putting in my office.’ The director, Stephen Kay, said, ‘Oh, great.’ So we have this rather intense scene, and my character is just putting through it.”

Which honestly is the perfect addition to an already stellar scene.

As Garcia said himself, the scene was intense. What better way to show the fierceness of Gallino than to have him nonchalantly carrying on in the moment while practicing his putting stroke? That’s about as mob boss as it gets, and it was an incredible act of improv.

That Andy Garcia dreamt up entirely by himself:

“(Golf) was just mentioned, and Billy said, ‘I know that you like to play golf,’ so I thought it’d be interesting if I was putting. I just brought the putter with me, and I said, ‘What if I’m putting?’ to the director. He said, ‘Great, let’s do that.’ You know how golfers will take the chance to practice our putting, wherever it is.”

What’s even more impressive? Taylor Sheridan rarely ever allows for improvisation in his shows, and Billy Bob Thornton touched on that in an interview with Awards Radar.

While some people might assume that actors and actresses on Sheridan shows throw a little of their own stuff into takes from time to time, Thornton revealed that Taylor doesn’t like to stray away from the script:

“Taylor wrote some wonderful scripts, and his writing is pretty tight, but Taylor has actually been very loose with me. There’s not a lot of improvisation on his stuff. As a matter of fact, I’d say Taylor and the Coen brothers, who I worked with a couple of times, they’ve had scripts that you stuck to more than anybody I’ve ever worked with.

But with me, Taylor said, ‘Look, you’re a writer, you’re a director. You get this stuff. We’re partners in this.’ So, every now and then, I’ll throw something in there, and if he likes it, he keeps it. But his writing is so good that I rarely do anything outside of it.”

So with that in mind, it sounds like Andy Garcia was fortunate to have his putter improvisation included in the fourth episode of Landman.

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