‘Yellowstone’s’ Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser talk Costner’s departure

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Warning: This article contains spoilers from the Yellowstone Season 5B premiere

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NEW YORK CITY — Kevin Costner’s John Dutton might be gone from Yellowstone, but Kelly Reilly, who plays his daughter Beth on the popular TV Western, says he’s “very present” as the series comes to a close with its final six episodes.

In last Sunday night’s premiere, the head of the Dutton family was killed off with his death staged to look like a suicide after his son Jamie’s (Wes Bentley) scheming girlfriend Sarah (Dawn Olivieri) hires a hitman to kill him.

Costner, who announced earlier this year he was exiting Yellowstone to focus on his four-part Horizon film saga, learned of his character’s fate after the episode aired.

“I didn’t see it. I heard it’s a suicide, so that doesn’t make me want to rush to go see it,” Costner said in an interview with SiriusXM’s The Michael Smerconish Program on Monday morning.

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“I’m going to be perfectly honest. I didn’t know it was actually airing last night,” Costner said. “That’s a swear to God moment. I swear to God. I mean, I’ve been seeing ads with my face all over the place and I’m thinking, ‘Gee, I’m not in that one.’ I’m not in this season.”

But Reilly, 47, insists that Costner’s Dutton is still “very present in our storytelling” this season and hinted that the character’s demise on Taylor Sheridan’s Western crime-drama was inevitable.

“John Dutton is so central to this season,” Reilly told Postmedia in a interview last week in Manhattan. “Yes, there was a pivot and things had to happen sooner to end the show the way Taylor envisioned many years ago … But John Dutton is our central character.”

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Following the death of the Dutton patriarch in the episode’s opening moments, Beth immediately enlists her other brother Kayce (Luke Grimes) to join her in a brewing war against the power-hungry Jamie.

After the finale of Part I of Yellowstone’s fifth season teased a murderous plot brewing between the Dutton family siblings when it aired last year, Bentley told Postmedia that the conclusion won’t pull any punches.

“Kelly and I for the whole time we’ve shot this show have imagined all these different endings. Them going to therapy or them teaming up,” Bentley told Postmedia on the red carpet at the Season 5B premiere at the Museum of Modern Art. “But it’s just been a full-on war and so you’re going to get a full-on war this season.”

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Bentley also reflected on Costner’s departure, saying that he wasn’t surprised the Oscar winner moved on.

“You’re always kind of prepared in TV nowadays that big changes are going to happen,” Bentley, 46, shared. “So mentally I was already prepared.”

Once Yellowstone concludes, Sheridan will continue telling stories set inside the Dutton universe with new seasons of his prequels 1923 (starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren) and 1883 (with Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill) on the way, as well as The Madison, a new spinoff that will be led by Michelle Pfeiffer.

Reilly called Costner’s Dutton “the soul of the show” that birthed a TV empire and promised fans will be satisfied by the series’ resolution. “There is going to be a loss, but then you get to (see) what that loss is going to mean for all of us. That’s part of what the story is now and was always going to be,” she said.

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Before the premiere, Postmedia spoke with Reilly and onscreen husband Cole Hauser, who plays John’s adopted son Rip, to talk about Season 5B’s ending and Yellowstone’s legacy.

Yellowstone has been a TV phenomenon. How does it feel wrapping it all up?

Reilly: “There’s something about it coming to its end; its final crescendo that we’ve been working towards all these years. It’s very satisfying. The scripts were great. We got to come back together after a year off because of the strikes and … there was a fresh energy. We put aside all of the noise that had nothing to do with the integrity of the work we wanted to do, and we got to come back together and deliver something we’ll all be proud of.”

Yellowstone is one of those shows that seemed to get more popular with each new season. What was it about this universe Taylor Sheridan created that appealed to so many different people?

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Hauser: “It starts with the writing, I’d say. Taylor and his dream of creating this environment in Montana … then there’s the backdrop and the characters.”

Reilly: “It’s so beautiful to watch as well. It’s beautiful to look at. But who knows what that magic ingredient is that makes a show successful? We’ve been asked so many times, ‘What do you think it is?’ and we just looked at things that I think work about our show … but you can’t repeat it for someone else. It has to be authentic to its own thing and I think that’s what Taylor created. It was something really unique to what he wanted to make with his storytelling. Having that singular vision, helps. You’re not going by a formula or trying to repeat something.”

Hauser: “I don’t think he knows how to do that. He’s very talented that way. He’s been writing this since the beginning. There’s no writers’ room. All of these shows he writes himself and we’ve watched him through the years. He’ll be on set and two days later he’ll have six episodes (written). I don’t know how he does it. It’s shocking at times.”

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If you had to compare these final batch of episodes to a theme park ride, what attraction is watching this season going to be like?

Hauser: (Laughs) “I’d say it’s like the Colossus … It’s at Six Flags Magic Mountain (in California). When I was a kid, it was this rickety old unbelievably fast scary roller-coaster.”

Reilly: “Well, that sounds about right. It’s fast and raw and terrifying. I’m hoping the audiences heart rate is just going to go up.”

Rip and Beth are two characters audiences have fallen in love with. What do you hope their legacy is?

Hauser: “I hope it’s one of passion, love, loyalty and honesty.”

Reilly: “Loyalty for sure. I think they have each other’s back so much. They protect each other with their lives. Rip saves Beth on a few occasions and I think she would die for him. There’s something intense and larger than life about their love story, which I think is intoxicating.”

Yellowstone streams Sunday nights on Paramount+.

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