MAKING A ‘PROPHET’

Kitsch as Koresh in 6-episode ‘Waco’ series

T exas is a familiar setting for Taylor Kitsch.

The Canadian-born actor, who lives in Austin, found his breakout role as high school football player Tim Riggins in the cult hit “Friday Night Lights,” set in fictional Dillon, Texas. He’s back in a Lone Star State setting for “Waco,” in which he plays fanatical cult leader David Koresh, the polygamous, selfproclaimed “final prophet” of the Branch Davidians who died in the 1993 ATF raid on his Waco compound.

“I think it’s a question that will never have a real answer: why [David Koresh] believed what he believed,” says Kitsch, 36. “As an actor, you just try to understand.” The raid on Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound lasted 51 days (from Feb. 28 to April 19), claiming the lives of nearly 80 Branch Davidians (including Koresh) and four ATF agents. The six-episode “Waco” series chronicles the fiery siege, and co-stars Michael Shannon as lead FBI hostage negotiator Gary Noesner, who was working in conjunction with the ATF.

“It’s one of those events in US history where everyone kind of knows where they were at the time,” says Kitsch (who was 12 years old in 1993). “I think I remember just that last visual of the compound in flames.”

The newly minted Paramount Network (formerly Spike), is using the event’s 25th anniversary to launch “Waco” as its first original scripted series.

Kitsch says he lost 30 pounds for the role. “It wasn’t fun,” he says. “But I had four months to do it, so six or seven pounds a month. Especially during the siege, where water and food was cut off, a lot of people in that compound lost weight. So I just wanted to get as close to [Koresh] as I could.”

He also learned how to play guitar — and that’s where his sharing Texas stomping grounds with Koresh became significant.

(The series was shot in New Mexico.)

“David was an okay singer but a really solid guitarist,” says Kitsch. “So I picked up a guitar and had lessons two to three times a week. Maybe two months into [my lessons], the guy who owned the shop figured out I was playing David. They were like, ‘He came in here! I remember meeting him!’ I was like, ‘That’s incredible, are you serious?’ That was just pure coincidence.” But that wasn’t Kitsch’s first strange “Waco”-type coincidence; that happened shortly after he landed the role as Koresh. “I was walking to a concert outdoors — the ACL Fest in Austin,” he says. “And I had just signed onto [‘Waco’]. I was talking to my mates and [we walked past] a guy going off on how Waco was a conspiracy theory, how it never happened, how there was no David Koresh. I think people come to their own [conclusions] or deal with it however they do, but it was just really fascinating for me. All my mates were like, ‘This is crazy; who even talks about Waco?’ I literally stopped on the sidewalk and listened to him for probably 45 seconds. “I guess I was meant to play this role.”