Both actors see their characters as alter egos for Milch.

“There’s an autobiographical tale being told,” Olyphant said, a point that has added poignancy now that Milch has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. In the movie, set a decade after the original series, Swearengen is in decline, threatening to topple the town’s delicately balanced power structure. While the show always had an elegiac quality, the movie—written by Milch and directed by Dan Minahan—meditates even more affectingly on loss, grief, and the passing of time. At its premiere in Hollywood last week, Milch read from scripted notes to an audience dotted with cast and crew members. At one point, he looked up and said wryly, “Do not get old, if you can possibly avoid it.”

Talk of reviving Deadwood had swirled almost as soon as the series ended, but Olyphant always staunchly resisted it. He said Milch’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis gave him additional pause: “Perhaps one of the reasons I thought it was a bad idea was, you know, [he’s] the man with all the answers. We’re all looking off of his test. Who are we going to cheat off of if he doesn’t have all the answers?” Olyphant was relieved to find the man relatively at peace.

“This was one of those sets where nobody went back to their trailer,” Olyphant said. “You just wanted to soak it up. Whenever he was there and available, I would find myself cozying up next to him just to, you know, get a little more. Squeeze a little more juice out of him.”

McShane shared the sentiment.

“The great fascination and the great kick of the show, apart from all the terrific actors you got to work with, was going in every morning and hearing Milch rip off a take on the scene,” he said. Those takes often came with erudite historical or political context rather than specific notes. Milch once asked an actor to study 190 pages of material about a 16th-century heretic, none of which ever popped up on the show. Other times, he might conceive of a new scene on the spot. Fienberg said the production team would whip up a new set in a couple of hours.

Although Milch did not come to the Deadwood movie set every day, McShane said he was a regular presence, though those riffs of yore had been replaced with a new tactic.

“He'd written down what he thought the scene represented in the larger context of the world of Deadwood,” McShane said. “It brought back all kinds of memories. Thirteen years later, you just walk on that set and smell that horse shit combined with smoke . . . and you’re back home again.”

The day I visited the set, it happened to be Election Day in 21st-century America, and inside the resuscitated Gem Saloon, actors in stiff 19th-century suits and dresses mixed with crew members in contemporary garb wearing big, round “I VOTED” stickers. It seemed oddly perfect for a series about politics and the corruption of American democracy—the raw reality of a no-holds-barred struggle for power and economic interests coexisting alongside high-minded ideals of civic participation and community.

“My experience watching the movie is it feels like it’s as contemporary a show as it’s ever been,” said Olyphant. “It feels like a show about modern-day America. Like any great fable, it seems so relevant.”

McShane also finds a perennial resonance in the tale. “I love the fact that nobody wore a black hat, nobody wore white; they all wear varying shades of gray,” he said. “If you’re going to get any complicated human being on-screen, you have to show the warts and all.”