‘FINDING AN OLD SHOE THAT FITS’

Hugh O’Brian laughs when asked if he was excited about reprising his role as Wyatt Earp.

“Listen, at this age, it’s good to get excited,” he quips. “It was a lot of fun, kind of like finding a nice old shoe that fits,” the robust 69-year-old says.

“When we did the series, there were an awful lot of people who came on the set who knew Wyatt Earp,” recalls O’Brian, who devotes most of his time helping young people with his organization, the Hugh O’Brian Youth Foundation. “Some of them were people he’d put away and had just got out of prison.”

Earp died in Los Angeles in 1929 at the age of 80.

Because O’Brian played Earp for so many years, he says, “I’m pretty close to the old gent and fond of his style. He was a very relaxed individual. But when he moved, look out. He was kind of like a coiled spring.”

O’Brian wanted to make everything as authentic as possible on the series, including the action sequences. “Whenever there was somebody I was going to grab, or one way or another come in physical contact with, they always had two or three extra vests and shirts. If I was supposed to grab a guy, a lot of time the vest came right off. They are colorizing this as you know, but I always kid that it was shot in black and blue to begin with.”

O’Brian reports that some 8,000 fans lined the streets during the filming of “Return to Tombstone,” which marks the first time a Wyatt Earp movie actually has been shot in the famed Arizona locale.

“They came as far away as New Jersey and Florida. Maybe they thought Sharon Stone was going to be there! It was fun to see that many people, but what was also amazing was when I first walked down the street to do one of the scenes, someone started to sing the ‘Wyatt Earp’ theme song. Everybody joined in. I stopped a bit and laughed with them and made the mistake of saying, ‘I am going to give $5 to anybody who knows the second verse.’ I think I lost $300 real quick.”