There’s a rich TV drama tradition of characters who are supposed to die in pilot episodes who prove so popular that they’re resurrected between the time the pilot is shot and when it airs. On “Hill Street Blues,” beat cops Hill & Renko were supposed to die a stunning death in a shooting, but the characters proved so likable that they were just badly wounded. In the “ER” pilot, Carol Hathaway’s suicide attempt was supposed to succeed, but the producers realized Julianna Margulies added a valuable ingredient and let the ER docs save her.

And on FX’s “Justified,” Raylan Givens was supposed to kill his old friend Boyd Crowder, just as he did in “Fire in the Hole,” the Elmore Leonard short story on which it was based. But producer Graham Yost saw that “The Shield” alum Walton Goggins was so magnetic as Boyd that it would be a waste to kill him – and Leonard, often irked when adaptations deviate too much from his work, approved.

As Boyd, a demolitions expert, onetime white supremacist and religious leader, and a born liar – even he’s not sure sometimes whether he believes the ridiculous things he says – Goggins is every bit the charismatic equal of Timothy Olyphant as Raylan, and he’s again memorable as the series returns for its new season Wednesday night at 10.

Goggins is also a very smart, articulate guy (he produced the Oscar-winning short film “The Accountant” back in 2001), so I was eager to talk to him at press tour a few weeks ago. We spoke about the evolution of Boyd, his contributions to that, and also quite a bit about what happened to his character at the end of “The Shield,” so read at your own peril if you haven’t seen that finale but intend to one day.

(Also note that I had to cut out a number of exchanges about things Boyd does in the first three episodes of the new season, so there may be a few abrupt transitions in the transcript.)

Am I going crazy, or has Boyd’s accent evolved over time?
It has evolved over time because he’s evolved over time. In the pilot, I wanted this guy to love words. I wanted him to love words and I wanted him to wrap his mouth around words. And there was one scene early on that I just started playing with and kind of tweaking. And Graham let me have carte blanche, gave me autonomy with this guy. And in the pilot I was able to introduce this guy in the way he sees the words by saying, in the middle of his speech, “Well you, know we were talking about this target and it was an innocuous target, you know what that means? That means harmless.” And Boyd was a showman. He was a bigger than life kind of showman in that pilot episode. And then when they came back and they said, “Would you stay?” I said, “If we can do something else, because a guy has a near-death experience, then he’s going to find God, you go to God and you’re going to experience a high level of humility.” And so with that we were able to bring him back and make him very quiet and very humble. Those next 4 episodes for him (when Goggins was busy filming “Predators”), I was just able to pop in for a scene here and there, but he was very quiet. And then once he found his next stage, he was really able to start to get big again and more precise because the message was more precise and the Bible was more precise. He wasn’t quoting himself; he was quoting the Bible. And this season… he’s just kind of in a spiritual turmoil. And he doesn’t really understand any of it. He’s just trying to be known. He’s looking for nothing and that’s dangerous. So his voice would reflect that.

When “Justified” premiered on FX, a lot of viewers were just excited to see Walton Goggins back on TV after “The Shield.” “Justified” quickly earned its own audience and Goggins made guest appearances as the show found its legs. “Justified” returns for season two on Feb. 9 and Boyd Crowder is back full time. I caught up with Goggins at the Fox party for the Television Critics Association in January for the scoop.

Q: Are you back as a featured character this year or the same number of appearances as last year?

WG: No, no, I’m back. It’s my show now with Tim. Yeah, it’s both of us. I’m signed on for good. It’s good.

Q: So how does that change the role and the commitment for you?

WG: Well, the commitment will be I can’t do another movie simultaneously. They kind of bought me, I’m there. I think it’s going to allow for the relationship between Raylan and Boyd to really take off and become more nuanced and complicated.

Q: Movies aside though, is that what you wanted all along?

WG: It is what I wanted, yeah. I think it’s what these two characters deserve.

Q: Are they sort of reflections of each other in a way?

WG: I think so, yeah. I don’t think Raylan can really exist without Boyd and Boyd can’t really exist without Raylan. They wear a similar hat, even though they look different on the surface.

His character, Boyd Crowder, began the series, which returns for its second season on Feb. 9, as a seemingly psychotic white supremacist. But as the show progressed, an apparent spiritual awakening led the character to break with his father, a crime boss, and, in the season finale, save his on-again, off-again adversary, played by Mr. Olyphant, in a climactic shootout.

Mr. Goggins grounded the pulpy twists with an understated portrayal that mixed the series’ florid dialogue with an unhinged ambiguity. Boyd’s motives were never entirely clear, and a character originally presented as a “stereotypical over-the-top redneck racist,” as Mr. Goggins put it, was revealed to be an intelligent manipulator and a cagey counterpoint to the United States marshal Raylan Givens, the protagonist, played by Mr. Olyphant.

The evolution happened on the fly. The original script killed off Boyd in the pilot, and when the producers decided to keep him around, Mr. Goggins helped them take the character beyond a stereotype. “I wasn’t interested in playing that person in the pilot,” he said. “I’m from the South — I’m not going to sell out my own culture for the sake of a television show.”

I for one am very excited, as at the end of last season I suddenly wanted them together. And as Walton said, Boyd is very complex so seeing how he handles a relationship will be very interesting!

Question: Do you have any scoop on Justified? —Veronica
Ausiello: What if I told you that Boyd (Walton Goggins) was going to get romantically involved with his onetime sister-in-law Ava this season? Better yet, what if Goggins told you himself?! “It’s going to be an interesting relationship,” he says. “I talked [to the producers] about how Boyd would approach love, and how different that would be than Raylan. Boyd’s a really deep guy. He’s probably someone who would create a flower out of a napkin or just read poetry for hours.”

“Justified” creator Graham Yost said the second season of his show, which is based on an Elmore Leonard short story, will be more serialized and will center on a family feud as well as the idea of second chances.

Character actress Margo Martindale plays Mags Bennett, the matriarch at the center of the family feud between Raylan Givens’ family and hers.

“I’ll be 60 this summer, so it’s great to be able to be a villain at my age,” Martindale said during the panel.

Timothy Olyphant, who plays Raylan and thinks “people are crazy” for naming babies after his character, said that Leonard’s original story and the writers’ scripts make it easy for him to fill his character’s shoes.

“If the writing is good, it just makes your job easier,” he said. “When writing’s not good, it’s harder to memorize. It’s harder to figure out what you’re doing. I find the character rather complicated and quite surprising, and that makes it fun to do.”

This season, Raylan and his ex-wife, played by Natalie Zea, become entangled in an affair. And Boyd Crowder, played by Walton Goggins, struggles with the fact that he no longer believes in God.

“He finds order in the universe when he believes fervently in something, whether it’s Nazism, which is [terrible] or God,” Goggins said. “And now … after going down this road of believing in God in order to make sense out of the universe, now he believes in nothing. That’s really interesting because I don’t know how this guy acts believing in nothing. If you don’t have that kind of rigidity for a character like this, then it’s absolute chaos.”

If you missed the first season of “Justified,” you can catch up with DVDs that go on sale Tuesday.

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I’ve added 20 photos of Walton alongside with his fellow Justified co-stars at the 2011 FX Winter TCA Tour from January 15th.

Gallery Link:
- 2011 > 01/15/11 – 2011 FX Winter TCA Tour – Justified Panel

I’ve added 7 additional promotional photos of Walton for the 2nd season of Justified into the gallery, three of which are with the lovely Joelle Carter

Be sure to check out the newly redesigned Justified website over at FX.com

Gallery Link:
- Justified (2010 – 2011) > Season 2 > Promotional / Marketing