Here’s another frontier (a big one) to conquer

Hollywood has always liked frontiers, old and new.
Those are great places for a hero — Davy Crockett or Roy Rogers or Captain Kirk — to be on his own, without back-up or 9-1-1.
And now we have “The Last Frontier.” It’s a 10-parter, Fridays on Apple TV+, starting with two episodes on Oct. 10.
This time, the frontier involves distant parts of Alaska. It has some of the same things Davy and Roy faced, plus one more:
“Everyone had to do a fight sequence,” Jason Clarke (shown here), who stars, said in a Zoom press session. And “everyone had to take physical training with horses … And then to shoot in minus-25.”
He plays Frank Remnick, a U.S. marshal who’s moved, with his wife Sarah (Simone Kessell), to a distant piece of Alaska.
“We’ve moved home, (with) Frank talking about retirement and going off to pursue some stuff (his) wife wants to do,” Clarke said.
But then a transport plane crashes, freeing violent criminals. Frank must protect the local people, find bad guys and pierce some secrets.
“There is a much larger sort of story/conspiracy, maybe, that we’re unpacking,” said writer-producer Jon Bokenkamp.
He previously created “The Blacklist” and stayed with it for eight of its 10 seasons. Now he’s trying to build another multi-layered show.
There are mysterious characters here, including Havlock (Dominic Cooper) and Sidney (Haley Bennett).
Sidney “is not of this world,” Bennett said. “She’s transported to Alaska, where she has to do some kind of damage control. And she’s really a fish out of water.”
So are the actors. Bennett grew up far from Alaska (in Florida and Ohio). The others weren’t even from this continent — Cooper from England, Kessell from New Zealand, Clarke from Australia.
“You find a lot of similarities” with Alaska, Clarke said. “Australia’s very open — big, huge country. It doesn’t have mountains like that, but it’s got the solitude, it’s got the danger.”
But the remote-Alaska is its own world, Cooper said. “There are no boundaries …. We felt we were very remote from everything. It was actually a wonderfully freeing thing.”
For Cooper, this comes at a rich time. He once landed the cute-guy roles — the bridegroom in “Mamma Mia,” the title schemer in “Preacher,” the younger version of Tony Stark’s dad in Marvel movies.
Now come richly layered roles. “The Gold” a true-crime tale that debuted in England two years ago, is on PBS (10 p.m. Sundays) at the same time that “Last Frontier” is on Apple.
“I’m really happy it’s found a home here,” he said of the former. “I’m very proud of that piece of work and that corrupt lawyer I had a lot of fun playing.”
But that was done on “a tiny budget” for BBC, he said. “The Last Frontier” had a big-time, streamer budget.
It had “a lavish backdrop, beintg Alaska. (And) I couldn’t believe it when I turned up on set and saw an actual airplane in a field.”