Raylan has an insta-grown daughter … and a fun story

Kids grow up fast these days, we’re told. So Willa Givens shouldn’t surprise us.
She was a baby (literally), the daughter of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens and a former court stenographer, when “Justified” began its final season. And now, eight years later?
In “Justified: City Primeval” (shown here) – debuting with episodes at 10 and 11:15 p.m. Tuesday (July 18) on FX – she’s 15, an attractive teen with long hair, goofy smile and adventurous spirit. How did this happen?
“We fudged the timeline,” writer-producer Dave Andron admitted to the Television Critics Association.
But it was for a good cause. That let Vivian Olyphant – who is 20 or 21 and the daughter of Timothy Olyphant, who plays Raylan – get the role. (They’re shown here.) It also allows for dad-daughter bickering.
At 15, Willa Givens is ready to resist all parental suggestions. Michael Dinner, a director-producer, points to “that scene where Raylan says, ‘For once in your life, just say, ‘Yes, Dad.’”
Teens often resist that in fiction or in real life. Off-camera, Olyphant said, “the only difficult times were when she would tell me to ‘go (bleep) off’ and the crew could hear it.”
He may be joking, but there’s no way to tell. Olyphant has a dry sense of humor that’s Raylan-esque.
The character was sort of born at a book fair, when author Elmore Leonard met a real guy named Raylan Givens. “He said, ‘That’s one of the best names I’ve ever heard in my life,’” said Peter Leonard, his son. “And he then thought, ‘That’s a book.’”
He loved the character and the “Justified” pilot script, Peter Leonard said. “He called me and said, ‘This is really good writing …. They have been able to capture my sound, my voice, my attitude.’”
The show ran six years, ending in 2015. Leonard – who died in 2013, at 87 — had already encouraged its producers to try any of his other books.
He had written “City Primeval” in 1980, as he was shifting from cowboy tales. It’s set in Detroit, where his family moved when he was 8 and where he had written newspaper stories about the police.
“’City Primeval’ is his first crime novel,” Andron said. “And he really embraced Detroit. It’s a big part of the piece.”
It was filmed in Chicago, but Vondie Curtis Hall – a Detroit native who plays a low-life chap named Sweetie – said it captures the spirit of his home town. He could see “people that I had grown up with from Detroit – the musicians and the con artists and the hustlers and the middle-class Black folks.”
And welded onto this is Raylan Givens, who wasn’t in the novel. He’s a Kentucky guy, suddenly in a different world. He’s “a stranger in a strange land,” Andron said. “It’s the land of Elmore.”
And he’s reluctantly bringing along his daughter. She ignores, resists, disputes; she also finds a fondness for people. “That’s why this show is so interesting,” Vivian Olyphant said. “All of the characters are so cool, but they also have so much heart.”
And she’s surrounded by them – a 20-or-21-year-old actress, playing a 15-year-old we knew as a baby.