The fifth and final season of Yellowstone began production this week, while former leading man Kevin Costner is over at Cannes being a different cowboy. But the drama is far from over amongst the former Yellowstone star, who is finally opening up about what went down at the ranch.
Costner had remained mostly quiet about his sudden exit and the drama that followed, seemingly to lessen any confusion for the cast and crew. He told GQ, “I’ve been quiet about the whole thing and I’ve taken a beating out there. My castmates are confused. The crew was confused.” Costner then said that he was, initially, fine with the various delays in production because he had loved working on the series.
“We very rarely started when we said we would, and we didn’t finish when we said we would. And I was okay with that. I really was. I was okay with it, but it wasn’t a trend that could continue for me,” he continued. After the Yellowstone crew announced plans to split the final season into two parts, Costner grew impatient. The first half of season five finished airing in January 2023, and the show was quickly put on hiatus. This caused scheduling issues for Costner’s post-Yellowstone passion project, Horizon, which he starred in and directed. “I said, ‘I have a contract to do Horizon, and I have people and money.’ I think there was a belief that I couldn’t get it mounted, but I didn’t really care what anybody believed.” This is where the messiness got… messier.
After going back and forth, Costner allegedly offered various compromises, but nothing was met, and more drama unfolded. “I said, ‘Well, if you want to kill me, if you want to do something like that,’ I said, ‘I have a week before I start. I’ll do what you want to do.’” As time went on, Costner became less cooperative and more pissed off about the situation. Costner’s “one week” comment quickly turned into a series of headlines claiming he refused to work for more than a week. “Somebody picked up the idea that I only wanted to work one week. And that has been a carryover thing that I have seen in magazines: that I’ve only wanted to work one week,” he told GQ.
This is what hurt Costner the most. “My big disappointment is I never heard Paramount or 101 really come to my defense and say, ‘That’s not true. He was going to do three more seasons.'” Costner said, to him, the truth was clear: “I started off only giving three seasons, ended up doing five and got embroiled in a thing that I don’t feel one person over there ever told the story correctly, ever, about what I had done and what I’ve been willing to do,” he explained. “That’s really f*cking bothered me, that none of them would actually try to set the record straight.”
When asked if he would ever return, Costner says that’s up to Sheridan. “I love that character. I love that world. I am a person that is very script oriented. And if the scripts aren’t there now, I need to know what I am. I want to make sure that the character lines up with what’s important to me too. And that’s pretty simple. That’s just between, again, Taylor and myself. Can we ever get there? I don’t know.”
On the other side of things, creator Taylor Sheridan has addressed Costner’s film. He told Hollywood Reporter last summer, “I sure hope [the movie is] worth it — and that it’s a good one. He took a lot of this on the chin and I don’t know that anyone deserves it.”
Meanwhile, this week in Cannes, Costner received a 7-minute standing ovation after the premiere of Horizon, and he promised/threatened moviegoers with three more installments. So… it might be a good one? Sorry, Taylor.
(Via GQ)
