Kevin Costner Opens up About the Biggest Challenge He Faces on 'Yellowstone'
Kevin Costner plays John Dutton on Paramount Network's hit series, Yellowstone.
The show is wrapping up season 3, and about to start filming its fourth in Montana.
The actor admits that it's hard to spend so much time away from home, especially his seven children and wife Christine Baumgartner.
Kevin Costner is the first to admit that filming Yellowstone isn't always what it seems.
Just last year, he admitted that working on the show "hasn't been an easy adjustment" for him. Initially, Yellowstone was pitched to Costner by the show's creator Taylor Sheridan as a "long movie," but over time it turned into four — and counting — seasons with 10 episodes each. Although Costner has previously done TV (the three-part History Channel series, Hatfields & McCoys), Yellowstone is uncharted territory for him.
At first, he struggled with pace of filming a TV show — but now that he's three (almost four) seasons deep, he's come to realize that making Yellowstone isn't all too different from movies. "The work is the same for me," he tells Good Housekeeping. "The days are the same. They're always long, they start early, and they go late."
In many ways, playing John Dutton on Yellowstone is a juggling act for Costner. While he loves filming the show in the heart of the Bitterroot valley ("I feast on that type of history," he says.), it also takes him away from his family. The 65-year-old actor, who has been married to Christine Baumgartner since 2004, has seven children — three of which are younger than 13. "It puts me away from home. I go home every moment I can," he explains. "But this year, we're filming exclusively in Montana, which makes going home almost impossible. When you deal with two airplanes, it's all-day travel. If it's all-day travel home, then it's going to be all-day travel back."
No matter how far he is from home, Costner's kids are at the heart of everything he does. When accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 20th Annual Critics' Choice Movie Awards in 2015, he thanked his children for all the sacrifices they've made: "All the years, all the tears saying goodbye at airports as I headed off to do yet another movie. Their brave faces trying to comprehend the time that I would be away and when I would come home. Hugs that never wanted to end. My children have always been bigger than the movies. They've always been more important. It's because of them that I've been able to do what I love."
Even if the show plays out for a few more years (the show's creator hinted that the series will last for six seasons), he reassures us that he'll figure out a way to make things work. In fact, he has "plans on how I want play out the second half of my career" — and Yellowstone is certainly a part of it.
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