As Yellowstone fans await the back half of the show’s final season, creator Taylor Sheridan has provided an update on its main star.
Drama had bubbled up recently around Yellowstone star Kevin Costner’s availability to film the rest of the final season after he embarked on shooting his multipart western epic Horizon. His absence was cited as what was delaying production on the show’s remaining episodes.
Sheridan shared in a wide-ranging, NSFW interview with The Hollywood Reporter new insight into Costner’s status with the show and the reported fracas between Costner and Paramount.
Says Sheridan: “My last conversation with Kevin was that he had this passion project he wanted to direct. He and the network were arguing about when he could be done with Yellowstone. I said, ‘We can certainly work a schedule toward [his preferred exit date],’ which we did.”
There are ongoing discussions to try to convince Costner to film a few scenes to wrap his character, though the scripts are not yet complete. One would think Dutton having final conversations with his warring kids, Beth and Jamie, would be particularly helpful to set up the show’s home stretch.
Sheridan added context into how his relationship stands with Costner during the entire situation.
“My opinion of Kevin as an actor hasn’t altered,” Sheridan says. “His creation of John Dutton is symbolic and powerful … and I’ve never had an issue with Kevin that he and I couldn’t work out on the phone. But once lawyers get involved, then people don’t get to talk to each other and start saying things that aren’t true and attempt to shift blame based on how the press or public seem to be reacting. He took a lot of this on the chin and I don’t know that anyone deserves it. His movie seems to be a great priority to him and he wants to shift focus. I sure hope [the movie is] worth it — and that it’s a good one.
“I’m disappointed,” Sheridan adds. “It truncates the closure of his character. It doesn’t alter it, but it truncates it.”
The interview also hints at how John Dutton’s story could end on the show.
Sheridan hints that John Dutton was never going to be around for the very end of the show, and that the conclusion of Yellowstone is unchanged from his original movie script. So Dutton will likely be — in the parlance of the series — “taken to the train station.”
The article notes that the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike will likely knock the final episodes of Yellowstone off a planned November 2023 premiere date. However, Sheridan told THR that the final episodes could go as long as needed, even as many as 10 episodes.
“If I think it takes 10 episodes to wrap it up, they’ll give me 10,” Sheridan says. “It’ll be as long as it needs to be.”
It looks like the future is still fairly uncertain for the Dutton Ranch, with the only thing to bank on being its inevitable end.