Timothy Olyphant as U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens in the pilot episode (“Fire in the Hole”) of Justified.
(Photo by: Prashant Gupta, FX)
Vitals
Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, proudly old-fashioned Deputy U.S. Marshal
Miami to Kentucky, March 2010
Series: Justified
Episode: “Fire in the Hole” (Episode 1.01)
Air Date: March 16, 2010
Director: Michael Dinner
Creator: Graham Yost
Costume Designer: Ane Crabtree
Background
Inspired by a selection of Elmore Leonard stories like “Fire in the Hole”, Justified premiered 15 years ago this week on March 16, 2010.
The series began with a literal bang as Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) demonstrated his quick trigger finger by outdrawing a “gun thug” in his assigned territory of Miami. Though he frequently insists “it was justified,” Raylan is ordered by his superiors to leave Miami, reassigned to the Lexington field office in his home turf of eastern Kentucky where he used to dig coal with now-criminal Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins).
“We weren’t what you call buddies, but you work a deep mine with a man, you look out for each other,” Raylan reflects of his and Boyd’s initial acquaintanceship.
Under the supervision of local chief deputy Art Mullen (Nick Searcy), Raylan immediately makes his presence known to familiar faces from friends to foe and everything in between, including the fiery hillbilly femme fatale Ava Crowder (Joelle Crowder), whom he seeks to protect from Boyd and his family after Ava killed her abusive husband in self-defense.
Before production moved to California for subsequent episodes, the Justified pilot was primarily filmed in my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and neighboring towns across Allegheny, Armstrong, and Washington counties that were redressed to portray eastern Kentucky coal country.
What’d He Wear?
Elmore Leonard had a defined idea for how Raylan Givens would dress, which Kentucky native Ane Crabtree effectively interpreted for the screen when designing costumes for the first season of Justified. Leonard’s story “Fire in the Hole”, which was the basis for the pilot episode and set the foundation for the first season (and the series as a whole), significantly referred to Raylan’s wardrobe in swaths of dialogue that would be replicated nearly verbatim on the series:
“You still look the same as you did at Glynco,” Art said, meaning the time they were both firearms instructors at the academy. “Still wearing the dark suit and wing-tip cowboy boots.”
“The boots’re fairly new.”
“Don’t tell me that hat is.” The kind Art Mullen thought of as a businessman’s Stetson, except no businessman’d wear this one with its creases and just slightly curled brim cocked toward one eye, the hat part of Raylan’s lawman personality. He said no, it was old.
Like much else from the story, this exchange would be familiar to fans of the show, where Nick Searcy’s Art observes: “You look the same as you did at Glynco. Same coat, same boots…” with Raylan again correcting that “the boots are fairly new” and Art looking up to respond “don’t tell me that hat is.”
Boyd Crowder’s reunion with Raylan is also punctuated with commentary around his style of dress and, like as with Art, was transferred almost verbatim into Graham Yost’s teleplay:
“God damn, look at you, a suit and necktie, all dressed up to look like a lawman.” He gave Raylan a hug, patting his back, Raylan letting him for old times’ sake. As they stepped apart Boyd looked over at Devil. “Here’s how you wear a hat, casual, not down on your goddamn ears.”
The Hat
Raylan’s signature hat was crafted for Timothy Olyphant by Mark Mejia at Burbank hatmaker Baron Hats, who had also created the actor’s headgear years earlier on Deadwood. Less the “businessman’s Stetson” described by Leonard, the sahara tan 200XXX beaver hat followed a classic cattleman’s-style profile with its tall 4.25″ crown, 3.25″-wide brim, and the narrow brown tooled leather band with its three-piece buckle set.
Though Raylan would eventually wear the hat with the buckle almost exclusively on the left side of his head, there’s less consistency in the pilot episode as he wears the hat both forward and “backward”—that is, with the buckle positioned over the right side.
Many describe Raylan’s hat in shorthand as a Stetson—and, indeed, the famed hat company began producing a “Marshall” in tribute to Raylan’s headgear—but both costume designers Ane Crabtree and Patia Prouty (who took over from the second season onward) have mentioned that Olyphant’s screen-worn hats were made by Baron, with the gold-printed Baron logo even visible on the hat’s brown leather sweatband in some scenes, including when Raylan sets his hat down on Art’s desk in the pilot episode.
The Clothes
With some variations like his tan suit and the orphaned jacket, Crabtree’s costume design in the pilot episode generally sets the pattern for how Raylan Givens would dress on the job through the entirety of Justified, with his hat, boots, jeans, and tooled leather belt adding the cowboy element to his tailored jackets, dress shirts, and retro-minded skinny ties.
“Maybe I was dressing that way a little bit—and maybe that’s ego again—but I was like, this would make a really cool dude, like a really cool marshal. In Kentucky. And I’m from Kentucky, so why can’t it be real?” Crabtree reflected in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation.
Just as Raylan’s attitude is anomalous with the times, there’s an incongruity with his wardrobe on the job as he blends off-the-rack business-wear over his torso with the affectations of a “cowboy lawman”. For more contextual harmony, he may have preferred sportier jackets, western-informed shirts, and textured ties. However, Crabtree comments that the easygoing Olyphant disdained excessive clothing trials—a no-nonsense attitude that would also extends to Raylan, who likely pushes the boundaries of U.S. Marshal Service dress decorum while remaining true to the rugged comfort of his own sartorial preferences.
Though his ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea) later comments on the simplicity of two suits, four shirts, and two pairs of jeans hanging in his closet, Raylan cycles through nearly two dozen tailored jackets over the course of the series—including at least eight in the first season alone. The charcoal pinstripe single-breasted jacket he wears for his arrival in Kentucky only appears in the pilot episode, but he wears it with several difference shirt and tie combinations.
Almost certainly orphaned from a full business suit, the two-button jacket features notch lapels, a welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets, and an additional flapped ticket pocket on the right side. The sleeves, which are a bit long for Olyphant, are finished with four-button “kissing” cuffs. Despite how prominently Raylan wears the jacket through this episode, we don’t see much of the back, but it appears to have a conventional single vent.
From being questioned about the “gun thug” shooting in Miami to investigating the church bombing in Kentucky, Raylan’s first dressy shirt with this jacket is a pale blue-gray with a thin tonal stripe pattern. The shirt has a spread button-down collar that Raylan always wears undone (with the buttons possibly removed), a breast pocket, and button cuffs.
After the first episode, Raylan would almost always wear ties with his tailored jackets. Crabtree shared finding inspiration in “old Kentucky” aesthetics, giving Raylan a collection of “very thin ’50s ties,” beginning with the dark navy-blue tie that he wears throughout “Fire in the Hole”—first with his tan suit in Miami and again with this charcoal pinstripe jacket.
From the Lexington airport to the local watering hole with Art, Raylan dresses down his pinstripe jacket with a casual khaki work-shirt that nicely aligns with his rugged western-informed style. Made from a thick, durable cotton like moleskin, the long-sleeved shirt has a spread collar, two flapped chest pockets, and a front placket with contrasting dark-brown buttons.
The David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh doubled as the Lexington airport in the background of this quick shot depicting Raylan’s arrival in Kentucky.
When Raylan visits the Lexington office for his first meeting with Art, he wears a pale cream-colored western-styled shirt that is one of the surprisingly few in his wardrobe throughout the series. Worn open-neck like the khaki shirt, this long-sleeved shirt has pearl-finished snaps up the front placket and two flapped chest pockets—each presumably also closing with a single snap.
Snap-front shirts were pioneered by Rockmount Ranchwear through the early 20th century to lessen the danger of snagged clothing while riding. This heritage would make snap-front shirts particularly suitable with Raylan’s cowboy aesthetic, though he seems to prefer more conventional button-up shirts overall. Even more curiously, this scene marks one of the few times that Raylan wears non-matching trousers that aren’t jeans, striding into Art’s office wearing black slacks held up by a dressy black leather belt.
Art greets Raylan for his first day in the Lexington office. Note Raylan’s black slacks, a dressier compliment to his pinstripe business jacket but still an unfortunate choice given the lack of contrast and the fact that western-styled shirt that actually would work better with his usual jeans.
Through the second act of the episode as Raylan reintegrates himself with the Crowder clan, he wears a navy microfiber shirt and the same navy tie as earlier, which hardly contrasts against the similar shirting. (This may be a reference to Elmore Leonard dressing Raylan in “a blue shirt with a mostly dark-blue striped tie” for this incident in his source story.) The shirt echoes the design of his earlier pale shirt with its spread button-down collar worn totally undone, plus a button-up front placket, button cuffs, and breast pocket.
Especially when sported with his jacket and jeans, this emerges as the most “canonically Raylon” outfit that Olyphant wears in the first episode, as the costume designers would return to this approach of a tailored jacket, dark shirt, dark tie, and jeans for Raylan multiple times over the course of the series.
Elmore Leonard had generally stipulated that Raylan would wear a suit, but Ane Crabtree drove the decision to place him in jeans—specifically the iconic Levi’s 501® Original Fit:
I did a really lean silhouette with Levi’s. Because nobody was wearing Levi’s, that’s what I remember, and I was like “nobody’s gonna fuckin’ wear designer jeans in Appalachia and actually have a job.” It needs to be a uniform of such that you trust the person, and maybe he’s a little dangerous ’cause he’s a little street—well, Appalachia street.
The wash would vary across Justified‘s six seasons, but the pilot episode features Raylan wearing dark indigo stonewash denim. Styled with exposed rivets and the traditional five-pocket layout that has remained virtually unchanged since at least the 1960s, Raylan’s jeans demonstrate the usual Levi’s brand signatures of the arcuate stitch design across both back pockets and the telltale red tab sewn along the seam of the back-right pocket. The cut and button-fly specifically align with the 501® Original Fit, as well as the “501” model clearly legible on the leather-like Jacro “two horse” patch over the back-right beltline—best seen when Raylan picks up his jacket to leave Boyd’s converted church hideout.
Raylan holds his jeans up with a brown tooled leather belt that closes through a silver-toned single-prong buckle. Identified by the Facebook page It was Justified, this is likely the same Chambers belt he would wear in the next several episodes, decoratively tooled with a motif of flowers, mountains, and eagles. On the right side of his belt, he wears a nearly matching smooth brown full-grain leather paddle holster with his compact Colt 1911-variant pistol.
The Boots
Through the first two seasons of Justified, Raylan’s exotic brown cowboy boots were anteater leather boots by Justin. He would continue wearing these through the second season, replaced in the third season by custom-made ostrich-leg Lucchese boots.
Raylan’s Accessories
From the start, Raylan wears a sterling silver horseshoe-shaped ring on his right hand. Two braided rope-detailed prongs taper back from the open-ended horseshoe to the smooth band.
Not only does Raylan switch wristwatches throughout Justified, he also wears two different ones in the pilot episode alone! Only in “Fire in the Hole” does Olyphant wear a stainless steel Rolex Submariner Date dive watch. A favorite of Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, and the fictional James Bond, the Submariner has remained in constant evolution since its mid-1950s introduction, including the addition of a date complication with the ref. 1680 in the late ’60s.
Raylan likely wears the ref. 16610 Submariner Date, produced from the late ’80s through 2010. His follows the classic configuration of a stainless steel 40mm case, black dial with Superluminova hands and non-numeric hour indices, unidirectional aluminum bezel with black insert, and stainless Oyster-style three-piece link bracelet with the older fliplock-style clasp.
For most of the first season, Raylan’s canonical watch would be a sporty TAG Heuer Series 6000 chronometer—likely the same watch spied under his left shirt cuff as he leaves the courtroom to take Art’s call in the pilot episode. This watch has a brushed steel case with a matching rotating bezel, round white dial with a 3:00 date window, and a brown leather strap.
After this, perhaps to protect it from damage, Raylan switched to a similar-looking but considerably more budget-friendly quartz watch by the Japanese company Versales.
The Gun
“I want you to understand. I don’t pull my sidearm unless I’m gonna shoot to kill. That’s its purpose, huh, to kill? So, that’s how I use it. I want you to think about that before you act, and it’s too late,” Raylan calmly explains to Dewey Crowe (Damon Herriman) while the latter keeps his pump-action scattergun trained on him. When Dewey points out this fact, Raylan challenges by asking “can you rack in a load before I put a hole through you?”
Another first episode anomaly, Raylan’s sidearm for most of “Fire in the Hole” is a custom Colt Officer’s Enhanced Mark IV pistol, perhaps chosen after the SIG-Sauer P226 he used to controversially shoot the Miami “gun thug” was presumably suspended.
Colt introduced its 3.5″-barreled Officer’s ACP in 1985 as a subcompact variant of the classic 1911 design. In addition to the 37-oz. Officer’s ACP, this downscaled “Enhanced” series included the 24-oz. alloy-framed Lightweight Officer’s ACP and 34-oz. aluminum-framed, steel-slide Concealed Carry Officer’s Model. Despite the reduced size, these were all chambered exclusively for the same powerful .45 ACP round made famous by the original 1911 series, fed from six- and seven-round magazines. IMFDB notes that Raylan’s bright stainless steel “Ultimate Finish” model has been customized with a beveled magazine well, three-hole combat trigger, and Novak sights.
Elmore Leonard’s source story “Fire in the Hole” arms Raylan with an even more old-fashioned sidearm, which he refers to as “my old Smith forty-five Target,” described by Art as his “big six-shooter.” Later, when he’s facing off against Dewey Crowe, Leonard specifically refers to Raylan’s “.45-caliber Smith & Wesson” revolver, carried in “the worn leather holster” on his right hip.
Beginning with the second episode through the end of the series, Raylan followed Marshal Service protocol by carrying the standard-issue Glock 17 pistol in 9x19mm Parabellum, though he occasionally describes it as a .45-caliber model.
The Car
“Who you know drives a Town Car?” Boyd’s lackey Devil (Kevin Rankin) asks upon watching Raylan approach in his black 2003 Lincoln Town Car Signature Limited. In “Fire in the Hole”, Elmore Leonard explains that the Town Car was “one Art had taken off some convicted felon and given to Raylan to use.”
Sharing the same full-size sedan “Panther” platform as the Ford Crown Victoria, the third-generation Town Car was powered by Ford’s modular 4.6-liter SOHC V8 engine through the entirety of its 1998 to 2011 production timeline, mated to a four-speed automatic overdrive (AOD) transmission. After the first four model years were available in either single- or dual-exhaust configurations, the 2003 Town Car update unified performance options with only a dual-exhaust engine, generating 239 horsepower and 287 lb⋅ft torque.
Raylan would continue to drive third-generation Town Cars through the duration of the series. After the first episode, he drives a 1998 Town Car Signature Touring Sedan for the rest of the season, then switches back to a 2003 model year Town Car—albeit a base model—from the second season onward.
What to Imbibe
Justified celebrates its Kentucky setting with plenty of bourbon featured through the series, with Raylan alone seen drinking Ancient Age, Blanton’s, Buffalo Trace, Elmer T. Lee Single Barrel, Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 Years Old, and Wild Turkey 101 Proof at various times throughout the six-season run.
The pilot retains more brand anonymity; even when Ava offers to pour Raylan a drink, her bottle has a likely fictional blue-and-red label. She offers the same selection of mixers to Raylan as she does in Elmore Leonard’s story (for what it’s worth, Leonard specifically stipulates Jim Beam as the spirit she pours), though Raylan opts for “just ice”.
Upon his next stop, visiting Boyd’s church hideout, he’s greeted with a less commercially available local favorite: moonshine. Raylan’s wince after downing his jar of white lightning prompts Boyd to laugh “you been gone too long!”
How to Get the Look
Timothy Olyphant as U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens in the pilot episode (“Fire in the Hole”) of Justified.
(Photo by: Prashant Gupta, FX)
It would be hard to emulate Raylan Givens’ look without delving into cosplay, but there are certain lessons that can be learned to pull your personal style closer to that of an old-fashioned country lawman.
If you are going to wear a tailored jacket and tie with jeans, I’d recommend avoiding business-like pinstripes (as Raylan wears in the pilot) and favoring more of a sporty hopsack or tweed. Cowboy boots can work as long as you know you can comfortably walk in them, but I’d leave Raylan’s wide-brimmed hat to the real cowboys… unless you’re as confident in your abilities in a showdown as he is.
- Charcoal pinstripe wool single-breasted 2-button suit jacket with notch lapels, welted breast pocket, straight flapped hip pockets and flapped right-side ticket pocket, 4-button “kissing” cuffs, and single vent
- Navy microfiber long-sleeved shirt with spread collar, front placket, breast pocket, and button cuffs
- Navy tie
- Dark indigo stonewash denim straight-cut jeans
- Levi’s 501® Original Fit
- Brown tooled leather belt with silver-toned single-prong buckle
- Tan full-grain leather paddle holster
- Brown anteater cowboy boots
- Justin
- Light tan 200XXX beaver cattleman’s hat with buckle-fastened thin brown tooled leather band
- Baron Hats
- Rolex Submariner Date dive watch with stainless steel case, black bezel, black dial, and stainless Oyster-style three-piece link bracelet
- Sterling silver horseshoe ring with braided side detail
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the first season but watch the whole series.
The source material, Elmore Leonard’s short story “Fire in the Hole”, is also excellent reading.
The Quote
You make me pull, I’ll put you down.
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