It’s no secret that Yellowstone is one of TV’s hottest properties, as the neo-Western has captivated viewers and wowed critics for much of its four and a half seasons so far. After weeks of behind the scenes troubles with star Kevin Costner earlier in 2023, we now know that the end of the series is nigh, and will arrive with the finale of Season 5 later this year. Though Costner has become synonymous with the drama, creator Taylor Sheridan recently recalled a wild story about how Robert Redford very nearly led his franchise-making hit.
What Did Taylor Sheridan Say About Robert Redford Almost Starring In Yellowstone?
When speaking with The Hollywood Reporter recently, Taylor Sheridan revealed that while he was originally trying to set Yellowstone up at HBO (where it was in development for a time), he told executives that he wanted Kevin Costner to portray tough series lead, John Dutton. However, while they all agreed that they needed a major star to be the face of the drama, those in charge “didn’t see it” with regards to the Dances with Wolves star/director/producer, and made their own suggestion:
They said, ‘We want Robert Redford.’ They said, ‘If you can get us Robert Redford, we’ll greenlight the pilot.’
For those who don’t know, Robert Redford is an actor turned-Academy Award-winning director/producer, who helped bring several major films to fans during his on-camera heyday of the 1960s-1990s, with titles like The Sting, All the President’s Men, The Natural, and Indecent Proposal under his considerably talented belt.
While he has mostly stayed behind the camera in recent years, Marvel fans saw him as Alexander Pierce in 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier and 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, and he also has a history with Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. So, it makes complete sense that when HBO execs asked for a big star, they’d mention someone like Redford. With Sheridan eager to get his show on the air, he saw about trying to make the Ordinary People (which won him that Oscar) director his Dutton patriarch. Sheridan continued:
I drive to Sundance and spend the day with [Redford] and he agrees to play John Dutton. 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.’
Obviously, after the hard work and dedication given to make sure the premium cable heads got exactly what they said they wanted, this was not the shocked response that the creator was hoping for. And, the problem was made clear in short order, as the person on the other end of that phone call revealed that the original word choice in making their request wasn’t quite up to snuff. As Sherdian tells it:
And he says — and you can’t make this shit up — ‘We meant a Robert Redford type.’
Ahhhhh, yes. A “Robert Redford type” is, as pretty much anyone would know, a very different thing. Apparently, though, this HBO screw up eventually revealed the real issues that most of the executives had with Sheridan’s story, one of which was that it wasn’t “avant-garde” enough. Soon, most of those execs found themselves no longer employed by the network, and the one who did believe in Yellowstone gave Sheridan his script back, which allowed him to shop it elsewhere and bring us a hard-charging Western drama we didn’t even know we needed.
Fans are definitely bummed that we’ll be without the OG series soon, but at least we know that the franchise will live on, even without Costner.
