While Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone fate remains in a dusty haze, the actor originally did not plan to do the show for as long as he already has.
During a new appearance on Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert podcast, Costner recalled his original plan for performing on the now-hit Western drama series. While much has been speculated about whether he’ll return for the finale episodes of the fifth season, Costner said he initially agreed to do three seasons before the show was even made. As he described to Shepard and Padman, Costner was sent to sell the show to buyers in Europe. While there, he was asked if he was going to be in upwards of seven seasons.
According to the Horizon: An American Saga star, he said he had agreed to do three, though he thought it was just going to be one long season. As the story goes, he ended up appearing in all five existing seasons.
Despite the more recent drama over his continuation in the show, Costner praised the project. “I just believed in the world. I knew it was a soap opera. I knew we should all be in jail. We’ve all killed people there and so you throw logic out the window, right, a little bit,” he said.
Seemingly referencing the show’s co-creator, Taylor Sheridan, Costner added, “He has a great ear and he just wrote that stuff really authentically and it was good fun and he wrote my part especially well and Kelly [Reilly]’s part, so listen, I had a lot of fun with it.”
Now, fans await the second half of the fifth and final season, which officially went into production in late May and is slated for a Nov. 10 premiere. In a press release, Costner was listed as an executive producer, but whether he’ll appear and the fate of his lead character, John Dutton, is still unclear after more than a year of speculation and reported conflict.
“I’d like to be able to do it, but we haven’t been able to,” Costner told ET in April. “…I made five seasons of it — thought I was going to make seven, so how it works out — I hope it does — but they’ve got a lot of different shows going on… Maybe this will circle back to me. If it does and I feel really comfortable with it, I’d love to do it.”
