Queue examines the numbers behind the real life people who inspired Jeymes Samuel's Western.
Director and co-writer Jeymes Samuel’s tale of Black cowboys and robbers on a thrilling revenge mission, The Harder They Fall, transports audiences back in time to the Wild West of the 1890s. But his hard-driving vision of frontier life is quite different from the typical Western — despite what Hollywood would have you believe, white men weren’t the only ones traversing the uncharted West.
Samuel’s thundering epic features an all-Black cast playing real historical figures: Jonathan Majors as Nat Love, Idris Elba as Rufus Buck, Zazie Beetz as Stagecoach Mary Fields, Regina King as Gertrude “Treacherous Trudy” Smith, Delroy Lindo as Bass Reeves, LaKeith Stanfield as Cherokee Bill, and RJ Cyler as Jim Beckwourth. The film opens with title cards noting, “While the events of this story are fictional . . . These. People. Existed.”
Samuel developed a passion for Westerns in his youth, despite rarely seeing himself reflected onscreen: “I loved Westerns so much growing up that when they invented Google, I began to research all these great characters that we never got to learn about through movies.” His film serves as both a rousing, gunslinging adventure and a powerful corrective to outmoded ideas about cowboy culture. “After this movie, no one will ever say there were no people of color in the Old West,” Samuel says. Not only did these people exist, but their stories are also raucous, revolutionary, and unique.
Here we break down The Harder They Fall by the numbers.
1
Number of trains with the late actor Chadwick Boseman’s name on them
247
Number of rolls of wallpaper used in the interiors built on set
340
Number of pairs of boots sourced by costume designer Antoinette Messam and her team
Cinco
Name of Jonathan Majors’s 12-year-old horse
4
Number of bowler hats in Trudy Smith’s (Regina King) wardrobe
144
Number of days production was halted due to COVID restrictions
260
Number of waistcoats sourced for costuming
12
Number of people on the horse-wrangling team
16
Number of original songs in the film