‘Yellowstone’ Director on Where Taylor Sheridan Left the Door “Wide Open” to Continue After Finale
[This story contains major spoilers from the season 5B finale of Yellowstone (and 1883).]
Yellowstone has closed its stall doors — the ranch, that is. But will the story continue on?
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The season 5B finale that aired on Sunday delivered on the epic conclusion that had been promised by revealing the fate of the ranch at the heart of Taylor Sheridan’s saga, as well as the fate of the Duttons whose family has been running that ranch for 141 years.
After selling their land, the largest ranch in Montana, back to the Indigenous people who were there first, the fictional Broken Rock Reservation, siblings Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) ended the season 5B finale with fresh starts, finally free of the generational Dutton legacy to continue on with their own. But first, Beth collected on her vow to avenge the murder of their father, John Dutton (Kevin Costner), and killed their brother who had set John’s death in motion, Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley).
The $1.1 million deal for the ranch solved their financial woes and made good on a promise made by Dutton ancestors to the reservation’s ancestors in the Yellowstone prequel series 1883. The late Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), who narrated 1883 and who narrates second prequel series 1923, made a voice cameo in the finale to explain this full-circle ending.
The supersized tragic-yet-hopeful finale — titled “Life Is a Promise” and directed by co-creator and writer Sheridan — galloped away with 11.4 million viewers for Paramount Network, the largest night one audience in Yellowstone’s history. Going into Sunday night, Yellowstone-verse mastermind Sheridan and Paramount Network had not confirmed if this episode would be a season or a series finale. Recent reports said Reilly and Hauser have finalized deals for a spinoff with their married fan-favorite characters, Beth and Rip Wheeler. But the only official spinoffs so far are The Madison, which is currently in production, and another 1944-set prequel announced last year.
Executive producer Christina Voros, who directed the first four episodes of the six-episode season 5B, has been answering The Hollywood Reporter‘s questions all season long in weekly interviews. Now she can finally speak freely about everything they had planned in a top-secret season that accomplished exactly what she said it would by closing the door and yet leaving it enough ajar, should Sheridan decide to keep writing for Beth and Rip, or any of the other surviving characters in the flagship series.
Below, Voros (who also directed on 1883 and is working on The Madison) unpacks the biggest shocks of the finale, including Jamie finally being taken to the Train Station, how Sheridan filmed that final Jamie-Beth fight and the code word used in the script for his death scene. She also answers questions about the future of the franchise while talking about the happy endings for both Kayce and Beth — a rarity in Sheridan’s storytelling; one of those endings should truly ride off into the sunset, she says, but another is ripe for reopening: “You wonder if [Beth] can sit still that long.”
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Congratulations! Just like the Duttons, you are now free — free to speak spoilers about this finale. How do you feel today?
I don’t have the words yet. I think it will take me a couple of weeks to really process the enormity. It feels like graduating college — plus an anniversary and a marriage. It’s momentous. It’s hard to talk about it from the perspective of a viewer, even though I am also one, because it’s been such a life journey for all of us. Everyone has been posting their pictures from all the seasons and it’s like, my god, we really made a thing together. What the average viewer may not realize, this really is a chapter of life for all of us. People have had babies and lost parents and bought houses and moved to Montana. It really is a family. It’s not a turn of phrase. I count the people I’ve been working on the show with amongst the most important human beings in my life.
And so the weight of not knowing when we’re going to see each other again, not knowing what the next story is? It’s profound. Part of me is just compartmentalizing. It hasn’t hit me yet.
You have been saying all along that this finale would feel like an ending, a conclusion worth protecting and keeping top-secret, no matter what the future holds. It certainly did have a series finale feeling, with the final moments circling all the way back to the 1883 prophecy (which you did a great job answering when I asked you last week!) Why was this the right ending?
Because it’s both surprising and inevitable. I think there were people who figured it out before we got there, but I still think that it lands with such a resounding symphony that even if you saw it coming it still feels earned. It’s the final piece in the puzzle. It was the right thing to do. It completes the story in a way that I think is incredibly satisfying and beautiful to see.
A friend of mine said to me before the last episode aired, “How are you guys going to tie it all up in one episode?” And I think Taylor [Sheridan] did a really gorgeous job allowing the last episode to be everything that everyone loved about the series. It is this gorgeous landscape. It is big emotions. It’s action that is violent but driven from a place of profound feeling, and it makes sense of all these things you might have missed going back in the series and even, like you said, back to 1883.
Taylor always knew how this was going to end. In some ways it’s surprising that people didn’t know that before they saw it because it does feel inevitable. But I didn’t know it when I read the first script. I myself was so invested in the story that I didn’t know how he was going to tie it all up. So it was surprising to me, someone who made 1883. I think it is testament to his ability as a stroyteller to be able to keep you guessing up until the very end. Yes, there’s the Beth and Jamie ending — duh! But no one knew in the episode before how that was all going to come together so quickly. My hat goes off to Taylor for not only having tied all the different strings together in a bow, but to have allowed the final episode to have flavors of everything that people had come to love about the series in the first place.
Elsa Dutton’s ending monologue brings closure, forgiveness and freedom to the Dutton children we have watched for five seasons. Could this ending have happened if John Dutton was alive — is this why, whether Kevin Costner left the series early or if he had stayed, John Dutton always had to die?
My understanding is that was always the conclusion, because at the end of the day the solution that Kayce discovers is not a solution that would have been possible if John Dutton were alive. Inevitably, at some point, he was going to die. That is the inevitability of it. Even if there had been 17 more seasons with Kevin Costner, eventually in the story that is the saga of Yellowstone, that’s what happens. The patriarch passes and the legacy moves onto his children. I thought it was beautifully woven together in the finale that, even though this is not what John’s solution would have been, it is the only solution to do what he believed in and what his life work had been, which is to keep this land pristine and untouched and together.
Days ahead of the finale, reports surfaced of a Beth and Rip spinoff; reports first came out this summer that they were in talks to continue the flagship. Yet this finale gave Beth and Rip a happy, peaceful ending. Cole Hauser previously told me that he and Kelly Relly had always known about the ending. Still, he said Taylor Sheridan could always find a way to continue, and Reilly said, let’s see if the audience wants it to continue, but that she trusts Sheridan wherever he would take Beth. How does their ending leave the door open for Sheridan to continue on with Beth and Rip?
I think he left the door wide open. In the world of Taylor’s storytelling, happy endings are hard fought. There aren’t a lot of them. He does not write stories about marvelous things happening to people. I think he said to me once, “I create characters that people fall in love with and then I do terrible things to them.” And that is where the drama lies. So one has to ask yourself, if there was never another word of dialogue spoken between Rip and Beth, could we imagine that everything went great for them for the rest of their lives? Sure. But it’s unlikely. They are two fierce, fiery people with terrible things in their past. The notion of happily ever after forever is pretty simplified.
I think he has left the door wide open for any number of stories to come out of that romance, and because people are in love with them, I think an audience would be interested in seeing whatever story that would become. Because ultimately, when you have interesting, complicated characters, especially those with dark secrets, something interesting is going to happen. And I think what he has done with the way he ends the show, it could be the end of the fairytale or it could be the beginning of another tragedy. You just don’t know.
Do you think he already has some of those ideas brewing?
I do not pretend for one moment to understand the inner workings on Taylor’s mind. Look at the sheer volume of storytelling that he’s writing — not with a writers room, not with a writing partner, but that comes out of his own brain. I think the way that he has chosen to tell certain stories at any given moment is some kind of wild alchemy that no one can pretend to have a roadmap for. I will tell you that being able to collaborate with him is the greatest gift of my professional career. You don’t know what the next journey is, but you know it’s going to be a good one. I’m not trying to understand that machine, I’m trying to be a part of what that machine makes for as long as he will let me.
Is there anything you can now say about how or if the present-day spinoff series The Madison will connect to Yellowstone? [Note: Voros is currently in production on The Madison.]
We are very much in the process of building that story and I think the time will come when it is something we can talk a lot about!
What can you say about the future of Yellowstone?
I’m as curious about the future of this story as the viewers are. There is clearly an appetite for it to continue. Any great TV series that has a following that touches so many different people from so many different walks of life and so many different geographical locations… this story has had a profound effect on TV viewers. The dream is that there is more of the story to tell, and I think Taylor has left the door open for that to be true. What story he decides to tell? I don’t know.
Kelly Reilly spoke to me about a scene in the finale, not involving Beth and Rip, that explains the entire series. I think it may have been Elsa’s monologue.
I can’t speak for Kelly. I would assume it’s the entire sequence around Mo [Mo Brings Plenty] and Rainwater [Gil Birmingham] and the dismantling of the ranch, because it does tie back to that 1883 prophecy and because Taylor’s use of Elsa’s voiceover is so clearly intentional in doing that. I would imagine that’s what she meant, but I haven’t talked to her about it specifically.
Elsa’s monologue confirms that there have now been seven generations of Duttons, citing the promise James Dutton (Tim McGraw) made in 1883. It also lines up the family tree so that Jack (Darren Mann) and Liz Dutton (Michelle Randolph), who are characters in 1923, could be the grandparents of John Dutton (Costner). This is something that has been speculated about, debated and even kept a secret from the 1923 cast.
If the cast of 1923 doesn’t know, I certainly don’t!
How many people knew about Isabel May’s Yellowstone return?
It was very tight. The cast that was involved in the most secretive elements of the season got the full scripts, but that was a very small portion of the creative folks involved. We talked about this at the very beginning with script redactions. The costume designer didn’t get dialogue. The production designer had to read the scripts, but her art director didn’t necessarily see them. So people just knew exactly what they needed to know to make a scene happen, but the monologue was completely redacted.
We’ve also talked about code words. There was a lot to protect in this ending. Was Jamie Dutton’s death written as ”Jamie’s arrival” in the script? [Note: John Dutton’s death scene was “Crosby’s arrival” in the script.]
Weirdly, Jamie Dutton’s death became “Beth and Jamie play Scrabble.” I think it had to with putting pieces together, that might have been the origin of it. By that time in the season, some folks might have caught onto the “arrival” code word [used in the scripts for previous death scenes for Kevin Costner, Dawn Olivieri and Denim Richards’ characters]. We wanted to add a layer of confusion around it because so many people had “arrived” at that point. We didn’t want people to put it together, so that final fight sequence was, “Beth and Jamie play Scrabble.”
Were you on set for that final fight sequence?
Yes.
I have spoken to Wes Bentley and Kelly Reilly about how they approach these Beth-Jamie confrontation scenes, but this one rises above. How many takes were filmed of this fatal sibling fight and what were the actors like when they came out of this scene?
Everyone was exhausted. I think Taylor [Sheridan, who directed the finale] shot it all day. There were so many pieces, and it was the culmination. All of the hatred and violence of their relationship all culminated in this moment. So it was not like, “Let’s set up four cameras and put the stunt doubles in and then call it a day.” Taylor had something very, very specific in mind for what this fight needed to be, and it needed to be ferocious and it needed to be the culmination of everything leading up until that point. And so Taylor took a lot of time making sure that it felt that way.
What will happen when Kayce finds out that Beth killed Jamie? That’s something we don’t get to see. And would you say that Kayce’s happy ending is similar to Beth’s, where it’s open-ended enough that Taylor could pick back up with them at some point?
This is just a personal perspective on it. You feel like Kayce has been fighting for this for so long, to have peace and to have his slice of heaven and to have his family and to be able to live the essence of the purest form of what the ranch and what the land meant for him. That for his sake, I almost hope that is the happy ending. Like, good god, they fought for that so hard, don’t let anything mess it up.
They are all fighters and warriors in their own way. I know Beth has been searching for peace and she has found peace in the land that was the source of so much war and violence in her lifetime, but there’s something about Rip and Beth where you wonder, is Beth going to get bored? I didn’t really think about it until you just mentioned it, but I do see Kayce riding off into the sunset and raising his family and being at peace. But with Beth, you kind of wonder if she can sit still that long?
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Here’s how to stream Yellowstone. Read THR’s deep dive into the season 5B ending and round up of where all the main characters left off. Find more of THR’s chats with Christina Voros here, and read our post-finale interview with Gil Birmingham.
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