Timothy Olyphant has quite a pair of intimidating eyes on him. Even if the actor's name, or his 18-year body of work, doesn't ring an immediate bell, it's hard not to remember his gimlet-eyed glare. Sharp, penetrating and derisive, that stare is a ticking time-bomb, warning recipients they have mere moments to correct their behaviour before his thin string of patience snaps. Since 2010, Olyphant's unforgiving gaze has bored deep into the souls of the moonshiners, meth dealers and murderers who populate the dirt-poor coal-mining community of Harlan, east Kentucky, the setting of his hit drama series Justified. Marshal Raylan Givens is not Olyphant's first lawman: he was memorably furious as sheriff Seth Bullock in David Milch's prematurely truncated Deadwood. But Raylan Givens, who featured in Elmore Leonard's novels Pronto and Riding The Rap, as well his short story Fire In The Hole, has become the actor's signature role.

He's the fastest gun in Harlan. He's laconic, unflappable, unkillable and irresistible to the county's vast population of untrustworthy good gals and big-hearted bad gals. He wears a cowboy hat and doesn't look stupid. In fact, I tell Olyphant while cringingly anticipating The Stare, that for much of the first season, Raylan Givens was such a hotshot, such a beacon of charisma and confidence, I found him hard to root for. Thankfully, I get The Nod. "One of the challenges of telling this story is that you don't fall into the trap of just being cool, just waltzing through things in this laconic way. I think the trick is to put your hero in a tree and throw rocks at him. Unlike a lot of the dramas you see on television, Raylan's only going to move emotionally just a nudge; if he moves too far away from that, you lose the character. And that's the challenge: how can we invest in this character that gives us so little? The key is the other characters. It's very easy to fall into the trap of 'Raylan's the hero and these other people are all assholes', and that doesn't make for a very good show."



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Unlike the majority of current US cable dramas, Justified is not an antihero show. Raylan Givens doesn't stray from the path of righteousness. But he's frequently a dick about it, smug and self-satisfied, placing his personal interpretation of good and bad above other people's perceptions. The show doesn't flinch from depicting him as irresponsible and emotionally unreliable. It also digs into Raylan's deep-seated daddy issues. Givens isn't just a shoot-first, ask-questions-later anomaly at the Kentucky marshals' office, he's also the black sheep among his family of lawbreakers, and is especially despised by his father, Arlo, a career criminal and cold-blooded killer (played with dripping venom by Raymond J Barry). The other thorn in his side is the continual, corrupt, presence of Boyd Crowder, the Joker to his Batman; the man to whom an adversary will say, "You telling me to trust you makes me not trust you." Over the course of four seasons, Crowder (the great Walton Goggins) has evolved from a petty criminal who was supposed to be shot to death in the first episode to the erudite outlaw kingpin of Harlan, the Old Testament-quoting villain who runs the county's heroin and whores, in partnership with his girlfriend, Ava, the woman Raylan used to sleep with.

Justified doesn't just bring Elmore Leonard's characters to life in a way that – Jackie Brown and Out Of Sight aside – no other drama has managed, the show also captures the author's skill in changing tone between darkness and light. "We try to honour and pay tribute to Elmore Leonard every chance we get," says Olyphant. "And, more importantly, we try to steal from him whenever we can. One of the things I like about our show is our willingness to every year have a different theme as long as it's still in the Elmore world."

Elmore Leonard. Photograph: Marc Hauser/Getty

In the second, and best, season, Justified was at its most emotional as Raylan attempted to extricate a teenage girl from the homicidal matriarch of a clan of marijuana farmers. The following season was awash in dark humour, severed limbs and a parade of increasingly grotesque miscreants. This year centres on a series-long mystery about a legendary criminal mastermind who's been hiding out in Harlan for the past 30 years. While Raylan Givens's itchy trigger finger gets its usual workout, a new recurring character – Patton Oswalt's over-earnest constable Bob Sweeney – walks away with the series' most indelible instance of unadulterated badassery. All these outlandish characters, all this great writing, all these intense storylines, and still not a sniff of an award? "It's nice to be invited to the party and so disappointing when you're not," says Olyphant. "On the other hand, it's always nice to have that day free."

Olyphant and his show may not be buckling under the accrued weight of Emmys and Golden Globes but they are continually referenced as playing a crucial role in the current Golden Age Of TV, an era when American television critic Alan Sepinwall actually penned a piteous screed bemoaning the fact that there was just too much good TV to watch. I ask Olyphant if he feels like he's living through a particularly vibrant time for TV. "I'm aware of it. I have a sense of some of those shows. I'm in the business and I get that people are talking about 'Let's make a TV show' a lot more than I'm hearing 'Let's make that film'. A story like Justified? Thirty years ago, it's a no-brainer. It's a film, right? It's a film with many sequels, the Raylan Givens movies. And today, it's a TV show. I get that the landscape's changed. All the writers, they're not talking about film as much, they're talking about television, the opportunity to go and tell the story the way they want to tell the story, which is what cable offers. That HBO model, as long as three-dozen people watch one of their shows, they're like, 'That's fine, three more seasons.' HBO puts on, like, a six-episode series about the music scene in Minneapolis and 12 people like it. It runs for six years. It's amazing. On the other hand, the golden age of television? I think we're only talking about a handful of shows. I think there's still plenty of crap."

Photograph: Rex

I might disagree – and I might also inquire further about that fictional Minneapolis music scene show, which, if it was set in the 80s, I would watch right this minute – but I've managed to avoid That Stare. Speaking of which. He's aware of it? He knows it's his defining thing? "Everybody looks a certain way. I open my mouth, I look at someone, that's my look. You can soften it up, you can harden it, you can do what you want with it; it is what it is. I really think that it comes from the power of the storytelling. You take some guy's blank face – they've done these studies – and you put that blank face in the background of a birthday party and you think, 'Oh that guy looks so happy.' Then you stick that same blank face at a funeral and everyone thinks, 'Oh, that poor guy's so upset.' I think if you got me staring at somebody and you know there's drugs or guns involved, some guy who's got a Nazi tattoo across his chest and he's wanted for blowing up a black church, and I'm staring at him? You're thinking 'This guy's going to kill this dude.'"

Season four of Justified starts in the UK on 5USA on 8 May