Well, the thing about Tommy is: He likes the guys. He likes being involved in the day-to-day operations, at least to an extent. There are some days that I think he wishes he could never look at another pumpjack again. But it’s also part of what’s in his blood and what drives him to get up every day.
In this new role, he clearly will have to spend more time in boardrooms and at fancy dinners. I think you can take Tommy out of the patch to an extent, but not fully.
Tommy is never going to get the landman out of him. I mean, that’s who he is. He does not want to be an executive guy. I don’t think he wants to be in the suit, but I believe he’ll do whatever it takes.
As for Cooper, he’s still building a relationship with Ariana, with a love Wallace confirms is true, but that will evolve as time goes on. He also teases possible conflict between the show’s core father-son duo as Cooper starts to build an oil business of his own. Check out some of what Wallace had to say below:
That level of ambivalence, it’s not ambivalence due to lack of emotion or connection. It’s just, their circumstances are so fraught. There’s obviously a deep love and a deep connection there, for how short of a time these two have known each other. Whether or not they can last, whether or not they can grow beyond those circumstances is still to be seen.
It’s always cutthroat in the world of oil and gas exploration. I remember being on location when I was working in the oil field, and my supervisor would carry a pair of binoculars, and he would get up on his truck and look out to see what other rigs were working around us and what company it was. [The work is] not super clandestine, but everyone is always kind of keeping tabs on one another, and they’re always looking for the next thing or what these guys might be doing.
What Cooper is doing right now, he’s just kind of going door-to-door and looking for these small, little parcels of land, these small leases that even a company the size of MTech — which is a smaller independent compared to the BPs, Exxons, Chevrons of the world — they’re more of a mid-tier, and so they’re not worried about what he’s doing. Yet.
The Norris Family Is Going Through Some Big Changes
