Cy Tolliver

Cy Tolliver runs the Bella Union, the plush saloon that means to outshine Al Swearengen's Gem across the thoroughfare. He is smooth where Al is brutal, all courtly manners and cold calculation, and just as ready to profit from Deadwood's lawlessness. He wants dominance dressed up as respectability, and he pursues it with a smile.

Powers Boothe plays him with a genteel menace that never raises its voice, which makes the cruelty underneath land harder. The show gives him a rival's mirror-logic to Swearengen — same appetites, different manners — and Boothe finds the specific rot in that politeness, a man who enjoys control more than he enjoys anything it buys him.