Kevin Costner shed some light on his earth-shaking decision to depart Yellowstone during a recent child support hearing in Santa Barbara, California.
After months of rampant speculation, it was his ongoing divorce from estranged wife Christine Baumgartner that got the Oscar winner to open up about his departure from Tyler Sheridan’s hit series.
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While on the stand earlier this month, People reports that Costner said that it was a “long, hard-fought negotiation” about splitting season five into two parts that spurred his decision to leave Yellowstone. He went on to reveal that there were “no scripts written” for the second part of season five and “they still hadn’t finished” the first part of the season at the time.
As such, Costner said that Yellowstone was beginning to get in the way of his own Western epic, the four-part movie series Horizon: An American Saga, that he famously took out a mortgage to fund. He said he changed his schedule to shoot the first part of season five, adding, per People, that “that’s a big deal in this world.” In the end, filming Yellowstone twice a year simply wouldn’t work for him.
Costner reportedly went on to testify that he wanted to return for the sixth season of the beloved Paramount series but “I couldn’t help them any more. We tried to negotiate, they offered me less money than previous seasons, there were issues with the creative…”
Despite the fact that Costner’s decision spelled an early demise for John Dutton, Sheridan told The Hollywood Reporter that his opinion of him as an actor “hasn’t altered.”
“His creation of John Dutton is symbolic and powerful … and I’ve never had an issue with Kevin that he and I couldn’t work out on the phone. But once lawyers get involved, then people don’t get to talk to each other and start saying things that aren’t true and attempt to shift blame based on how the press or public seem to be reacting,” he said. “He took a lot of this on the chin and I don’t know that anyone deserves it. His movie seems to be a great priority to him and he wants to shift focus. I sure hope [the movie is] worth it—and that it’s a good one.”
“I’m disappointed,” Sheridan added. “It truncates the closure of his character. It doesn’t alter it, but it truncates it.”
In May it was confirmed that the final episodes of Yellowstone’s fifth season will launch in November, and that the fifth season would be the last for the juggernaut series.
