“They’re scared,” says Taylor Sheridan, looking amused as he steps onto his porch and away from a gaggle of publicists huddled inside his house. “They’re scared of what I might say.”
With good reason. The Yellowstone showrunner — who’s gone from an obscure actor to the most prolific writer in Hollywood in about a decade — isn’t known for pulling his punches and, lately, has been at the center of a stampede of dramatic headlines. His flagship show’s star, Kevin Costner, is exiting the series amid anonymous finger-pointing in the press.
There have been showrunner shake-ups on two of his other projects — the Sylvester Stallone drama Tulsa King and the upcoming spy thriller Special Ops: Lioness — where Sheridan seized the creative reins. The creator was also the subject of a recent report that suggested he uses his production budgets to pad his pockets. And his lone-wolf writing style irks some of the writers marching in picket lines who are demanding staffing minimums on TV shows.
It’s a helluva lot of debate circling one hitmaker who created his own genre of neo-Western storytelling and whose shows are so popular, they’re propping up an entire streaming service. Over a couple of hours of conversation, Sheridan reveals his side to these stories for the first time while offering unparalleled insight into his writing and producing process.
Taylor Sheridan Photographed by Emerson Miller
Sheridan takes a seat wearing a button-down shirt, rugged jacket, jeans and boots, complete with spurs (he was riding earlier). The 53-year-old is a formidable wall of blue denim, and his eyes are blue, too. Elizabeth Olsen, whom he directed in Wind River, once affectionately described Sheridan as “a cowboy who’s like a combination of your dad and the Marlboro Man.”
We’re sitting behind one of his houses on his massive Four Sixes ranch. The property is wedged up in the remote Texas panhandle, several hours’ drive from the nearest major city. (The Montana ranch in Yellowstone is fictional, but the Four Sixes, or 6666 — which is also featured in the series — is real.) Sheridan finalized his purchase last year, and it covers a staggering 270,000 acres — nearly the size of Los Angeles. Stretching from his porch is a dreamy field of virgin countryside extending to the horizon under cotton-ball clouds. There’s a warm breeze and, every so often, a Texas Longhorn steer trots by.
The importance of this place to Sheridan — and its connection to Yellowstone and to the rest of his TV universe — cannot be overstated. Sheridan grew up in North Texas, where the Four Sixes is legendary. The ranch and its horse-and-cattle operation were long controlled by a single dynastic family that battled for 150 years to protect their land and keep it largely intact. Sounds familiar, right?
“I grew up in the shadow of the Four Sixes,” Sheridan says. “To just get one of their horses was a status symbol, because they’re so well trained. This was the ranch I based [Yellowstone’s] scope and operation on, because it didn’t exist in Montana. Most ranches there had already been carved up. They’d already lost it.”
Acquiring the property, however, wasn’t easy. Sheridan says he renewed his overall deal at Paramount in 2021 and started pumping out prequels and pilots to help pay for all this. It was an extraordinary burst of get-the-ranch productivity that’s resulted in green lights for six series. Yet the amount of work that piled onto Sheridan’s plate as a result, coupled with his own obsessive drive to make every episode bearing his name just right, appeared to have some unforeseen consequences.
But first, let’s appreciate what Sheridan has accomplished, because it’s remarkable and rather strange. Twelve years ago, the struggling actor was down to his last $800 when he sold his first screenplay. He later created a TV show about a man who owns a dynastic mega-ranch who struggles to protect it and make it successful … and its success has allowed Sheridan to himself become a man who owns a dynastic mega-ranch who struggles to protect it and make it successful — and not just any ranch, but the same one that served as the basis for his show. Sheridan dreamed up a story, shared it with millions, and then stepped into it.
“Life imitating art was never my intention,” he says, and quips, “We haven’t killed anyone in weeks.”Sheridan (who lives with his wife and 12-year-old son) points out that actually he’s been involved with ranching his whole life and previously owned a modest 1,200-acre property. “That was my dream and I already had it,” he says. “It was a great escape from the fact I was a failing actor living in West Hollywood. The plan was always to become a big movie star, then move back to a ranch and just do movies with Martin Scorsese when I felt like it.”
Sheridan laughs at this. “But that wasn’t my path.”
“I was a fair actor, but that’s all I was ever going to be,” Sheridan recalls. “Hollywood will tell you what you’re supposed to do if you listen. If you’re banging your head against the wall for 20 years trying to be an actor, maybe you shouldn’t be an actor. But the first thing I ever wrote [the pilot for Mayor of Kingstown in 2011] got me meetings at every major network, at every agency. I had multiple people trying to buy it.”
Yet Sheridan refused to sell. The studios, he says, wanted to hire a room of more experienced writers to tackle the project — you know, make TV the usual way. Sheridan felt that he knew exactly how to write the show himself. So even back then, getting his first taste of success as a writer, Sheridan was reluctant to let others adapt his material and demonstrated a willingness to walk away. Some might call that stubborn or impractical; Sheridan sees it as trusting his instincts and sticking to his creative guns. He put Mayor of Kingstown in a drawer.
Over the next few years, Sheridan made a name for himself writing a trio of acclaimed films — Sicario (2015), Hell or High Water (2016) and Wind River (2017) — which he dubbed his “modern American frontier” trilogy.
Another of his scripts, Yellowstone, was likewise originally written as a movie. Sheridan pitched it as “The Godfather in Montana,” and it ended up in series development at HBO. Sheridan says then-programming president Michael Lombardo was supportive, but the rest of his team wasn’t.
“I thought Taylor was the real deal,” Lombardo says. “In a world of people who pose, he was writing what he knew, and he cared desperately about the show. The idea of doing a modern-classic Western was a great idea — we were always doing urban shows, and this felt fresh.”
The one thing they all agreed on was that Yellowstone needed a big star to play its uncompromising patriarch, John Dutton. Sheridan pitched Costner, but HBO executives “didn’t see it.”
“They said, ‘We want Robert Redford,’ ” Sheridan recalls. “They said, ‘If you can get us Robert Redford, we’ll greenlight the pilot.’ “
Being a can-do type of guy, Sheridan went to visit Robert Redford.
“I drive to Sundance and spend the day with him and he agrees to play John Dutton,” Sheridan says. “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.’ “
“And he says — and you can’t make this shit up — ‘We meant a Robert Redford type.’ ”A crisis meeting was scheduled with the network vp (“whose name I remember, but I’m just not saying it”) to get to the bottom of HBO’s reluctance.
“We go to lunch in some snazzy place in West L.A.,” Sheridan says. “And [Yellowstone co-creator] John Linson finally asks: ‘Why don’t you want to make it?’ And the vp goes: ‘Look, it just feels so Middle America. We’re HBO, we’re avant-garde, we’re trendsetters. This feels like a step backward. And frankly, I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think anyone should be living out there [in rural Montana]. It should be a park or something.’ “
Sheridan later put some of those lines into Yellowstone‘s season two, when a New York magazine reporter disses Montana to Wes Bentley’s character, Jamie … and then Jamie murders her.
The executive’s coastal elite diss convinced Sheridan that HBO didn’t appreciate his story. During a notes call, Sheridan says, executives took issue with Dutton’s ferocious daughter, Beth (Kelly Reilly), who has since become a fan-favorite sensation.
“‘We think she’s too abrasive,’ ” Sheridan quotes. “‘We want to tone her down. Women won’t like her.’ They were wrong, because Beth says the quiet part out loud every time. When someone’s rude to you in a restaurant, or cuts you off in the parking lot, Beth says the thing you wish you’d said.”
Sheridan recalls, “So I said to them, ‘OK, everybody done? Who on this call is responsible for a scripted show that you guys have on the air? Oh, you’re not? Thanks.’ And I hung up. They never called back.”
That should have been the end of the Dutton family. HBO typically retains the rights to scripts it develops and rejects, partly to prevent what happened next from happening — a project they spent time and money developing becoming a global smash for a competitor.
“When the regime changed, Lombardo called me,” Sheridan says about the longtime HBO exec’s exit in 2016. “To his credit, he said, ‘I always believed in the show, but I could not get any support.’ His last act before they fired him was to give me the script back.”
As for that nameless vp, Sheridan says he left HBO and landed a production deal. After Yellowstone took off, he emailed Sheridan to say congratulations — and to pitch him a family drama.
Sheridan says he wrote back: “Great idea. It sounds just like Yellowstone.”
After coming up empty at HBO, Sheridan shopped Yellowstone around town. Everyone, he says, turned it down (“I took it to TNT … I took it to TBS!” he marvels). When Paramount finally bit, Sheridan bluntly warned executives they were going to spend a ton of money on production and would not have any creative control.
In 2018, Yellowstone debuted on the company’s niche cable channel, the Paramount Network. Within a few years, ratings exploded. “People couldn’t understand how a linear cable channel that no one can even find suddenly had the biggest show on television,” Sheridan says. “Because it has cowboys and this is supposed to be a dead genre, right? Of course, that’s not what the show is really about, that’s just the sugar on the pill.”
What Yellowstone is really about is a dying American way of life, a clash between traditions that respect the land and the unstoppable intrusion of modernity. Yet by the time he was making season three, Sheridan was starting to worry that his not-so-secret mission to save ranches in real life was doomed.
“I thought I had tricked people by showing a world worth protecting,” he says. “But when the show is over, that notion will go away and there will be a new shiny penny everyone watches. So I felt like I didn’t accomplish anything — which, for me, is really important. Sicario is entertaining, but it’s about something: the jumbled mess at the border.”
Sheridan went to the Four Sixes in late 2019 and pitched its then-owner, 81-year-old Anne Marion, on the idea of introducing her ranch into Yellowstone with a few scenes. He pledged to make the Four Sixes “the most famous ranch in America.”
Marion asked if there would be any sex in the Four Sixes footage. “I said, ‘Well, one cowboy is sleeping with a vet tech, but don’t tell me that’s not happening already.’”
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