"You Cant Make This St Up"

Kevin Costner wasn’t the first actor cast as Yellowstone lead John Dutton — informally, at least. 

As detailed in this week’s Hollywood Reporter cover story profile on Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan, Paramount’s neo-Western hit was originally in development for years at HBO, but struggled to get off the ground. Sheridan says then-programming president Michael Lombardo was supportive, but the rest of his team wasn’t.

“I thought Taylor was the real deal,” Lombardo says. “In a world of people who pose, he was writing what he knew, and he cared desperately about the show. The idea of doing a modern-classic Western was a great idea — we were always doing urban shows, and this felt fresh.”

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The one thing they all agreed on, however, was that Yellowstone needed a big star to play its protagonist patriarch John Dutton. Sheridan pitched Kevin Costner, who would eventually take the role when the show was ordered by Paramount in 2017, but executives “didn’t see it.” 

“They said, ‘We want Robert Redford,’” Sheridan recalls. “They said, ‘If you can get us Robert Redford, we’ll greenlight the pilot.’” 

Being a can-do type of guy, Sheridan went to visit Robert Redford. 

“I drive to Sundance and spend the day with him and he agrees to play John Dutton,” Sheridan says. “I call the senior vice president in charge of production and say, ‘I got him!’ ‘You got who?’ ‘Robert Redford.’ ‘What?!’ You said if I got Robert Redford, you’d greenlight the show.”  

“And he says — and you can’t make this shit up — ‘We meant a Robert Redford type.’” 

Sheridan then had to make a rather painful call to the iconic Oscar winner to explain that the starring role he thought he had been empowered to offer him was slipping away. Lombardo also got on the phone with Redford to try and smooth things over, while HBO privately explained to Sheridan they weren’t sure about the then-80-year-old actor due to “his advanced age, and this and that.” 

So a crisis meeting was scheduled to try and get to the bottom of the network’s reluctance to move forward. Sheridan and his Yellowstone co-creator, John Linson, met with the senior vp (“whose name I remember, but I’m just not saying it”).

“We go to lunch in some snazzy place in West L.A.,” Sheridan says. “And John Linson finally asks: ‘Why don’t you want to make it?’ And the vp goes: ‘Look, it just feels so Middle America. We’re HBO, we’re avant-garde, we’re trendsetters. This feels like a step backwards. And frankly, I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t think anyone should be living out there [in rural Montana]. It should be a park or something.’” 

If that quote sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because Sheridan later put some of it into Yellowstone season two, when a New York magazine reporter disses Montana to Wes Bentley’s character Jamie … and then Jamie murders her. 

The executive’s candid diss was a culmination of Sheridan’s feeling that HBO just didn’t appreciate his project. During a notes call for the pilot, for example, Sheridan says executives took issue with the character of Beth Dutton, who has since become a fan-favorite sensation played by Kelly Reilly.

“‘We think she’s too abrasive,’” Sheridan quotes. “‘We want to tone her down. Women won’t like her.’ They were wrong, because Beth says the quiet part out loud every time. When someone’s rude to you in a restaurant, or cuts you off in the parking lot, Beth says the thing you wish you’d said.” 

Sheridan recalls, “So I said to them, ‘OK, everybody done? Who on this call is responsible for a scripted show that you guys have on the air? Oh, you’re not? Thanks.’ And I hung up. They never called back.”

That should have been the end of the Dutton family. HBO typically retains the rights to scripts it develops and rejects, partly to prevent what happened next with Yellowstone from happening — a show they invested in and rejected becoming a global smash for a competitor.

“When the regime changed, Lombardo called me,” Sheridan says about the longtime HBO exec’s exit in 2016. “To his credit, he said, ‘I always believed in the show, but I could not get any support.’ His last act before they fired him was to give me the script back.”

As for that nameless vp, he left HBO and got his own production deal. After Yellowstone took off, he emailed Sheridan to congratulate him — and to pitch a family drama that he was developing.  

Sheridan says he wrote back: “Great idea. It sounds just like Yellowstone.”

For more about Sheridan, including his breakdown of what exactly happened with quitting star Kevin Costner and new details about the future of the Yellowstone franchise — read THR‘s full cover story: Taylor Sheridan: “There Is No Compromising.”

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