‘The Lowdown’ Star Tracy Letts Breaks Down Frank’s Deadly Confrontation in Episode 7

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Lowdown Season 1 Episode 7, “Tulsa Turnaround.”]

The Lowdown took another deadly turn in the show’s latest installment as Akron businessman Frank Martin (Tracy Letts) scrambled to recover a handwritten will from Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson) that could have derailed his ongoing deal with the dangerous church known as One Well.

After Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) blabbed about the will held by an old man named Arthur (Graham Greene) to Betty Joe (Jeanne Tripplehorn), she bribed her way to some major money by handing the details over to Frank. When Frank went to recover the will from Arthur, though, the conversation went wrong as he tried tricking the old man into handing over the valuable document.

Sadly, Arthur was on the receiving end of a bullet after he pulled out a gun when he started imagining Frank in the role of the man who killed his grandfather over a crooked land deal decades prior. According to Frank, the shooting was accidental as they wrestled over the gun, but his roughness with Arthur left things open to interpretation as the shot rang out offscreen.

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As Lee realized the danger he put Arthur in, he and Marty (Keith David) rode over to his apartment to discover his dead body through the door, and a car chase ensued. Frank made his way to One Well, with Lee and Marty on his tail. Things were left on a cliffhanger as Lee entered the church, helmed by a white supremacist pastor, Mark Russell (Paul Sparks). Below, Letts breaks down Frank’s actions, motivations, and what it was like collaborating with Greene for the intense episode.

Betty Jo bribes Frank with the location of the handwritten will from Dale Washberg that could ruin Akron’s land deal with One Well. When he walks into that bar with the bag of money, is he as smart as he thinks he is? 

Tracy Letts: I think he’s ruthless, but ruthless and savvy are not necessarily the same thing. He’s perfectly willing to do whatever he needs to do to further his own agenda, but clearly, he makes a couple of grave miscalculations over the course of the series that ultimately cost him.  A lot of times, criminals aren’t too bright, or when you’re a criminal, you better be careful because often you’re dealing with other criminals, and that certainly is the case here.

Speaking of criminals, there’s a desperation to Frank’s urgency regarding the will; does that have anything to do with his fear of the One Well Church?

Yeah, that’s the thing about making a deal with the devil. It might seem good at the outset, but then when he confronts what One Well’s really up to… I mean, Paul Sparks is a scary character and taking him to a scary spot with some scary dudes… I’ve been around some scary dudes in my life, and they scare you. Obviously, when you encounter people who are ideologically scary. They’re really capable of anything because of ideological beliefs. And so yeah, it’s particularly motivating, I think, for Frank.

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Does Frank hold similar beliefs to One Well?

The sense you get is that Frank is not really an ideologue. The sense you get is that he is really motivated by money and potentially power, the teeter-totter of money and power. But no, I never got the sense that he was a hardcore ideologue, and then, in fact, he would turn on any of these people in an instant if he thought it would benefit him,

You work with the late Graham Greene in this episode. What was that experience like?

I loved working with Graham. I was such a fan of his going into it. When I signed up for the show, Graham wasn’t part of it, or if he was, I wasn’t aware that I was going to get a chance to work with him. He was a beautiful actor. I have a great memory of traveling in a van with Graham and Keith David, and the two of them, both of them great hams, sharing lines of Shakespeare in the car, in a friendly competition with each other, and to get on the set with him and play those scenes with him… He was a great, funny, cantankerous presence, and I delighted in the time I had with him.

Frank ultimately shoots Arthur dead, but we never see what actually happened. Do you think he’s being truthful when Frank claims he didn’t mean to shoot him?

Frank seems pretty ruthless, but at the same time, he is so upset by the death that it’s hard to believe… It’s not as if Frank is a psychopath. It’s not as if Frank didn’t have any awareness of what went down. So it does seem as if it happened in a tussle in an urgent moment was the way I felt about it. Obviously, that doesn’t make it right, but yeah, I don’t think he went in there with the plan of killing anybody. Frank is a guy who might push a button on a guy, but he’s not a guy who’s going to get his hands dirty, typically in those situations.

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What is Frank’s relationship with Trip Keating (Tom McCarthy) really like? Trip seems to have the upper hand and convinces Frank to go back to One Well.

I think Trip is kind of the money behind the money. There are always sort of concentric circles, especially in a murder conspiracy story like this. There’s always a guy behind the guy, and Trip was always for me, the guy behind the guy who was going to make my financial schemes possible just by his bankroll. But again, I’m kind of caught between two ideologues, these two guys who are really passionate about their racist, xenophobic beliefs, and I’m just trying to make some money here, but I’ll play the part if it gets me what I’m after.

When Frank is visiting Arthur, the old man remembers the occasion when his own grandfather was killed over a land agreement, and you’re the shooter in the sequence. What was it like filming that surreal scene?

That was fun to do. It was brutally hot that day. Some of the things you cannot see when you’re watching the show, when you start filming a series in February or March in Oklahoma, you’re all right, but once you get to May or June, look out, man, you may be going out there on a day when it’s 110 degrees and it is hotter than hell, and then they put you in a wig or a beard or a hat or a wool vest and you’re like, oh man, the ground is melting underneath your feet.

The Lowdown, Tuesdays, 9/8c, FX