Cooper Norris is Tommy’s son, working as a derrick hand on the oil rigs in the Permian Basin while his father operates above him in the chain of command. The show uses Cooper deliberately: he is the viewer’s ground-level access to what Tommy’s deals actually look like from the rig floor. Every lease Tommy negotiates, every crisis he manages from a boardroom, has a physical reality on the other end that Cooper inhabits. He is not symbolic — he is specific, with his own relationships and risks — but his position in the economic hierarchy maps the full distance between the industry’s winners and its workers.

His dynamic with Ainsley Miller — Monty’s college-aged daughter — creates the season’s most pointed class-collision: two young people who encounter each other across the full width of the economic order that the same patch of West Texas ground has produced.

Jacob Lofland was sixteen years old when Jeff Nichols found him through an open casting call in Arkansas for Mud (2012). He had never acted professionally. Nichols cast him as Neckbone, the laconic, self-sufficient river kid who befriends two runaways alongside Matthew McConaughey and Tye Sheridan. The performance was remarkable in the specific way that the best child and teenage performances are remarkable: it had no technique visibly applied to it. Lofland simply inhabited the character — the physicality, the idiom, the particular quality of attention that a kid who grew up along an Arkansas river and knows how to take care of himself would carry. Critics singled him out in a film that had significant competition for attention, and Nichols has spoken about how central finding Lofland was to the film’s success.

The transition from that kind of naturalistic debut to a sustainable professional career is one the industry makes genuinely difficult. Lofland appeared in Little Accidents (2014), a drama about a West Virginia mining community, and then in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015), the large-scale YA sequel that gave him franchise exposure. Television work followed. Landman represents his most significant role since Mud — and it draws directly on the qualities that made that debut memorable: a working-class physical authenticity and a resistance to performing what the scene could simply be.