‘American Primeval’ Star Dane DeHaan Explains What It’s Like to Be Scalped: “Going Down the Rabbit Hole of Severe Head Trauma Psychosis”

Netflix‘s American Primeval is essentially a show about how much it sucked to live in 1857 Utah Territory. From the moment that Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin) and her son Devin (Preston Mota) arrive at Fort Bridger, the gentle veneer of society slips away, revealing the grotesque animal impulses residing in the hearts of all men. The violence and squalor is so omnipresent, that not even the idealistic Mormon newlyweds Jacob (Dane DeHaan) and Abish Pratt (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) can escape its grasp.

**Spoilers for all of American Primeval, now streaming on Netflix**

American Primeval Episode 1 ends with the innocent couple tour literally asunder by the Mormon militia, the Nauvoo Legion, during the Mountain Meadows massacre. Abish is pawed off, along with a group of other Mormon ladies, to the Paiute. Jacob, meanwhile, is left for dead after being scalped.

For the rest of the series, Jacob has to not only deal with the loss of Abish, but also the fallout of being scalped. American Primeval star Dane DeHaan told Decider he found playing Jacob to be “intense,” but ultimately “rewarding.”

“Yeah, it’s look, it’s intense to be scalped,” DeHaan said. “The makeup was kind of an amazing process. It was one of my favorite, if not my favorite collaboration of this project.”

“Howard Berger was our head of makeup, but there was a guy named Jamie Kellman that I really collaborated on with the makeup every day to try to make sure it was accurate and told the story it needed to tell.”

American Primeval viewers will notice that as the series wears on, Jacob’s eyes become more bloodshot and his logic more erratic. It’s not simply that he’s suffered a flesh wound in battle, but a severe brain injury. DeHaan said his “main obstacle” in American Primeval was depicting that slide into mental instability.

“I’m basically going down the rabbit hole of severe head trauma psychosis,” DeHaan said.

“The everyday working actor, every day,” DeHaan’s co-star, Brigham Young actor Kim Coates, quipped about the task.

“So that is not on my side, you know?” DeHaan said. “I’m trying to avenge a massacre on my people, I’m trying to find my wife, I’m trying to make it to Utah, I’m trying to survive, but my sense of reality is extremely distorted because I am suffering from severe head trauma psychosis, which is getting worse and worse as the days go on.”

“It was an intense journey, but it was it was a rewarding one.”

One of DeHaan’s favorite parts of American Primeval was where Jacob’s journey eventually ended. Even after realizing that he was scalped by his fellow Mormons, the increasingly unhinged Jacob allows himself to become drafted in yet another masked incursion. This time, against the Shoshone, who have been framed for the massacre.

Jacob believes that the Shoshone have kidnapped Abish. He does not realize that his wife has chosen the Indigenous people over Jacob and the rest of the Mormons. So when a masked Jacob meets a version of Abish in warpaint in the heat of battle, he wastes no time shooting her. Ironically, as soon as he recognizes his wife, he removes the mask, ecstatic over their reunion. When she dies in his arms, the reality that he killed Abish sets in, and Jacob turns his gun on himself, dying by suicide.

“Yeah, it is kind of a messed up version of Romeo and Juliet. It does seem kind of fated, right?” DeHaan said. “It’s wonderful, I think, that Jacob really believes he’s going to find this person and he finds her.”

“What was important to me in that scene is that he’s happy. I know that seems so weird because he’s gone through so much and he’s about to make a really drastic move, but it’s almost like after everything he’s been through, he actually finds this person that he loves, that he’s been looking for.”

DeHaan shared that when he finally watched the last episode of American Primeval, he noticed that “Jacob is happy.”

“Like he’s smiling and, like, there’s parts of it, I think, when he realizes that [he’s killed Abish], it all kind of comes crashing down. But in the moment, it’s like, ‘I found her! I found her!'” DeHaan said.

If that sounds weird to you, DeHaan knows it, too. He chalked it up to the ethos that was making American Primeval for Netflix.

“Filming it was really wild,” DeHaan said. “There were a lot of scenes filming it, looking back that were really wild, let’s just say.”