Eddie Sawyer is a supporting character during the first season of HBO's Deadwood. A card sharp at Cy Tolliver's Bella Union saloon, Sawyer has worked with Tolliver for 17 years and is one of Cy's most reliable hands. He eventually starts to question his allegiance to Tolliver and decides to help Joanie Stubbs in funding her own brothel by stealing from Tolliver.
He is portrayed by Ricky Jay.
Biography[]
TBA
Behind the Scenes[]
Actor Ricky Jay was an incredibly gifted magician and card player in real life.
Eddie Sawyer's sudden departure from Deadwood season 2 left many viewers curious about his fate. Matt Zoller Seitz's The Deadwood Bible revealed that Ricky Jay had figured out his character was going to be killed in season 1. As a result, he panicked and locked himself inside his trailer, refusing to come out for two hours because he did not want to film his death scene. Deadwood's producers even tried convincing him to come out by assuring him that the plot twist was necessary for the show's overarching story, but Ricky Jay did not listen. He did eventually agree to come out of his trailer for filming the scene but had one condition for the show's creators: his death had to be ambiguous. Although they agreed to his condition, Deadwood's creator, producer, and writer David Milch asked Powers Boothe (Cy Tolliver) to stick his knife in Ricky Jay in such a way that audiences would be convinced that Eddie Sawyer was killed. Funnily, though, Deadwood season 1 did not feature the scene. Instead, in Deadwood season 2, the show's creators just wrote Eddie Sawyer off behind-the-scenes by establishing that he ran away before Tolliver could get back at him for stealing from him.
Appearances[]
| Episodes | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Season 1 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Season 2 | ||||||||||||
| Season 3 | ||||||||||||
| The Movie |
| ✔ | Appears | ✔ | Appears as a corpse | ✔ | Appears in a flashback |