What to Know
When Kevin Costner left Yellowstone in 2024, it was surprising to fans that the man who played John Dutton would just leave. After all, this is when the show was getting ready to end and was super popular, so why didn’t he just stick it out ’til the end? The rumor mill has churned out some pretty wild stories about what went on behind the scenes, but now, showrunner Taylor Sheridan is finally opening up about what made Kevin decide to walk away after five seasons.
Kevin Costner left Yellowstone halfway through the show’s final season.
Kevin’s exit meant that his character was killed in the premiere of season 5, part 2, effectively writing him off the show just before it was due to end forever (minus all those Yellowstone sequels and prequels, of course).
The first rumors that Kevin could be leaving began in 2023, when Deadline reported that season 5 would be the show’s last, and that there had been a lot of “back and forth between Costner and Sheridan arguing over dates to shoot.”
According to Taylor, Kevin left simply because it was time.
During an appearance on Bill Simmons’ podcast, Taylor said that originally, Kevin was “only supposed to be in the first three seasons,” so by the time he did leave, he’d already stayed a lot longer than he ever planned.
“That was in his contract. In my mind, that’s when his youngest son takes over [on the show]… But the network was so scared of not having Kevin be a part of it, even though Kevin was ready,” he said. “He was ready to go. He had other things he wanted to do, but he stayed on for another two seasons.”
The success of the show seems to have caught everyone by surprise, including Kevin.
“It was such a huge hit. The notion of giving up a hit before it had run out of juice to squeeze is very foreign to a network,” he said. “There was even pressure from some of the cable companies wanting to put it in their deals, that they were going to get an X-number of seasons of Yellowstone to re-up what this cable company is. That’s the power of a really big hit show.”
The truth is a lot more boring than the rumors of a feud between Taylor and Kevin.
In 2024, Kevin told Deadline that he ran into scheduling conflicts while trying to film his movie, Horizon, and film Yellowstone at the same time.
“What you read in the end was that I said, ‘Well, look, I’m doing my movie. If you want me to work a week because you want to kill me or whatever else, I can give you a week,’” he said at the time. “I really didn’t have that week to give them, but I said, I’ll do that. And then they [spun that] into, I only wanted to work a week.”
In the end, it sounds like he made the right choice — and maybe all that bad blood we were hearing about never existed in the first place?
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