10 years after DiCaprio’s Oscar, Western The Revenant is a secret sequel on Netflix!

The movie The Revenant, which hit theaters ten years ago, is what gave Leonardo DiCaprio the chance to finally win an Oscar for Best Actor. This twilight western by Alejandro González Iñárritu is inspired by the true story of adventurer Hugh Glass, who became famous for miraculously surviving a savage attack by a grizzly bear.

In addition to DiCaprio, the cast of the film also gathered Tom Hardy in the role of John Fitzgerald, Domhnall Gleeson in the role of Captain Andrew Henry and Will Poulter, who lends his qualities to the trapper Jim Bridger. The latter is considered a true legend of the West due to his connections to several major figures in American history.

In Iñárritu’s film, Bridger is a young man who is part of a trapping expedition formed after a bloody attack that destroyed their camp. He is assigned by Captain Henry to be part of the team responsible for protecting Hugh Glass until the second part of the group returns with reinforcements.

He repeatedly opposes the thuggish methods of Fitzgerald, who wants to destroy Glass in order to get hold of the bounty promised by Henry. Although Jim Bridger appears at first glance as naive and easily influenced, the film primarily portrays a character with great moral value.

The same character, fifty years later

This character also forms the connection between The Revenant and America’s Dawn, currently the most watched series on Netflix. About fifty years separate the chronology of the two plays, and Jim Bridger appears in this program as the senior performer: Shea Whigham.

But another link connects these two performances with the participation of Jim Bridger, because the film and the series were written by Mark L. Smith. The similarities between the brutally realistic tone of these westerns and their careful aesthetics lead us to consider Dawn of America as an indirect and unofficial sequel to The Revenant.

in the given interview on the advertising site The American screenwriter from Netflix reveals that he learned a lot about Jim Bridger’s story while writing The Revenant. Mark L. Smith wrote the pilot for a series based on Trapper’s life in 2016, not realizing that the project would end up on Netflix just ten years later.

Fort Bridger edit

“I wanted to continue exploring this character and this series gave me the opportunity” said Mark L. Smith in this interview. In the series, viewers especially had the opportunity to discover Fort Bridger, a military camp founded and run by Jim Bridger, which was completely created for the needs of filming.

“It became a kind of small village, there were shops, a dentist, a doctor and typical baths of the time.” The screenwriter explains. Even today, the remains of the fort remain a popular destination for historians and archaeologists and host the annual Rocky Mountain Meeting celebrating the 19th century fur trade.

The American Dawn mini-series is now available exclusively on Netflix.

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