Hell on Wheels: what happens to Mickey? Phil Burke says everyone expected him to die in season one
AMC's railroad western killed off most of its cast over five seasons. The Irish saloon keeper everyone expected to go first is still standing in the final scene, and the actor knows exactly how unlikely that was.
Hell on Wheels had a body count and a reputation for using it. The character nobody would have put money on outlasted the railroad.
Mickey McGinnes appears in 50 episodes across all five seasons of a show that ran 57 in total, from 6 November 2011 to 23 July 2016. He arrives as a supporting piece — one half of an Irish double act with his brother Sean (Ben Esler), running a magic lantern picture show out of a tent — and leaves as one of the last people standing.
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Why everyone assumed he was disposable
Phil Burke has been open about the odds. Asked by AMC in June 2016 how the character had lasted, he described the general expectation around the role when the show began.
"Most people thought my character would die, get murdered or get horribly run over on the train tracks in a drunken stupor," Burke told AMC in 2016.
Mickey was written as small, Irish, mouthy and frequently drunk, in a camp where those were all liabilities. He was also born with twelve toes, emigrated from County Wicklow having stowed away on a ship with Sean, left behind a mother and four siblings, and arrived in America with unfinished business in Boston that neither brother wanted to discuss.
What he does instead of dying
The arc is a steady climb through increasingly disreputable businesses:
- Seasons 1–2 — the magic lantern show, then boxing promotion and whatever else the camp will pay for.
- Season 3 — proprietor of the Phoenix Saloon, with the brothel attached.
- Season 3, the turn — Mickey shoots Sean inside a church tent after Sean threatens to confess their involvement in Senator Metcalf's death.
- Season 5 — established in Cheyenne with the saloon, and in a relationship with Eva.
The Sean killing is the point at which Mickey stops being comic relief, and Burke has drawn the distinction between the brothers plainly.
"Mickey is a survivor... Sean always tried to control the situation and be a mastermind. It didn't work out for him and he wasn't able to adapt to his surroundings," Burke said in the same 2016 interview.
The finale
"Done" aired on 23 July 2016. Mickey takes a payment from Thomas Durant and leaves for San Francisco to start a new business, throwing away mementos of the camp on his way out. Eva turns down a memoir deal and rides off on her own, telling him they're bad for each other.
He gets neither a death nor a reckoning. He gets a buyout and a train ticket, which for this show counts as an unusually clean exit — Cullen Bohannon sails for China, Durant delivers an unrepentant monologue about how the railroad could not have been built without him, and nobody comes out of the series with a tidier arrangement than the saloon keeper.
Burke called the character's development miraculous, which is a fair description of a man who arrived with a magic lantern and left with Durant's money.
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