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"A Red Herring": Why Did Kevin Costner Leave Yellowstone Season 5?
Kevin Costner led the hit show for several seasons as patriarch John Dutton, but there was trouble on the Horizon.
For four and a half seasons, fans of Yellowstone have watched Kevin Costner as John Dutton, the owner of a powerful Montana ranch turned governor of the state. But, Yellowstone is no longer the John Dutton story, as Costner left the Taylor Sheridan-created series during the fifth and final season.
Costner appeared in the first eight episodes, which aired in 2022 and 2023, but he is not in the second half of Season 5, which is now airing. Here’s why Costner isn’t part of the show anymore, as well as what happened to John Dutton — and Costner’s response.
What happened between Kevin Costner and Taylor Sheridan?
Following months of rumors, Costner confirmed in June 2024, via Instagram post, that he would be leaving the hit neo-Western series. The announcement was the culmination of mounting complications and disagreements between the star and the series creator, Sheridan.
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The chief issue seemed to be timing. Costner was making a Western of his own, the epic Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One and the forthcoming sequel, Chapter Two. He also has aspirations for two more installments in the Horizon series, though it remains to be seen if they will be made. As you can imagine, writing, directing, and starring in big, period-piece movies takes up a lot of time, and it became difficult to balance filming Yellowstone with making the Horizon films.
Things came to a head in May 2024, when Costner paused filming Horizon to return to the Yellowstone set. As he told GQ, this was not a good use of time, because “there was no script” and the show’s production was not in a place to accommodate his schedule.
“I fit [Horizon] into the gaps,” Costner told Deadline. “They just kept moving their gaps.”
Costner told People that he’d originally been approached to star in Yellowstone when it had been pitched as a one-season limited series, but as the show evolved, he “stepped up” and said, “'I’ll do it for three seasons,’ and I ended up doing it for five.”
A 14-month hiatus on the show's production, exacerbated by the strikes that brought Hollywood to a stop, was something of a final straw.
“There was a moment where that show for me stopped for 14 months,” he said. “That's the fact. I could have done a lot of things in that time, but I wasn't aware that that [hold-up] was going to happen."
Relations between Costner and Sheridan appear to have suffered a bit, as Costner’s offer to help write his character off the show didn’t pan out creatively in meetings between the two.
“I said, ‘Well, if you want to kill me, if you want to do something like that,’ I said, ‘I have a week before I start. I’ll do what you want to do,’” Costner told GQ, alleging that Sheridan’s camp spun that into a news story that he was lazy and only wanted to work one week.
What happened to John Dutton on Yellowstone?
Although Costner suggested that he was open to returning to Yellowstone at some point in the future (“Taylor and I know what the conditions are for coming back, and I’ll just keep that between ourselves,” he told GQ), it doesn’t seem especially likely. John Dutton was killed off-screen in Episode 9, leaving his children Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Kayce (Luke Grimes) to pick up the pieces. And in Episode 12, Sheridan himself — a regular guest star on the show as Texas-based cowboy Travis Wheatley — explicitly tells long-time character Jimmy Hurdstram (Jefferson White) that “John Dutton passed away.”
At first, it’s implied that John died of suicide, but it’s eventually revealed that Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), the fixer girlfriend of John's estranged son Jamie (Wes Bentley), put a hit out on John, with explicit instructions to the hit man to make it look like a suicide.
The opening episode racked up a record-shattering 21 million viewers, making it the series' biggest launch to date (per Deadline), indicating that more than a few people were interested in the Dutton family's ongoing struggles to retain their land and legacy.
What did Kevin Costner say about John Dutton's death?
Costner, for his part, told SiriusXM that he hadn’t watched the episodes since he left the show.
“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. He did, however, correctly guess that the suicide was “a red herring.”
While John Dutton may be dead, Costner appears to have had a happy holiday. The actor posted a picture of himself with six of his children to social media on Thanksgiving day, writing: "Hoping you guys had a wonderful Thanksgiving with the people you love most. At the top of my 'grateful for' list are the many really, really special memories I’ve gotten to make with my kids this year. Here’s to a holiday season dedicated to making more."
Yellowstone is streaming on Peacock.
