Before Yellowstone premiered on the Paramount Network in 2018, single-handedly revitalizing the Western genre, the show was trapped in development hell at HBO. In a new tell-all with The Hollywood Reporter, series creator Taylor Sheridan revealed that he initially cast Robert Redford in the role of John Dutton, at HBO's request. But the network still jerked him around: "I hung up. They never called back."
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Sheridan initially pitched Yellowstone as a film — "The Godfather in Montana," he told The Hollywood Reporter. His first choice for the gravelly patriarch John Dutton was Kevin Costner, but HBO executives "didn't see it," Sheridan said. Instead, they wanted the upstart writer-director to nab Hollywood icon Robert Redford.
So the Texas native courted Redford in-person. Remarkably, the 80-something-year-old star said yes: "I call the senior vice president in charge of production and say, 'I got him!' 'You got who?' 'Robert Redford.' 'What?!'"
"And he says — and you can't make this s*** up — 'We meant a Robert Redford type.'"
At the time, Sheridan had achieved critical success with his "modern American frontier" trilogy. He wrote the Oscar-nominated Sicario (2015) and Hell or High Water (2016) and directed the acclaimed Wind River (2017), which is getting a sequel. But the suits at HBO didn't think Yellowstone's contemporary cowboy ethos jived with the network's prestige legacy.
Sheridan recalled one heated exchange in which an unnamed HBO vice president took issue with Yellowstone's politics:
"We go to lunch in some snazzy place in West L.A. 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.'"
Remember the New York reporter Jamie murdered in Yellowstone Season 2? Yeah, Sheridan had her character quote that unnamed vice president.
Fast forward to 2023, when Yellowstone topped the season's ranking of most-watched shows on TV with an eye-watering 11.6 million average viewers per week — and that's on network television. Compare that to HBO's buzzy The Last of Us, which peaked with 8.2 million viewers in its season finale on both the HBO network and HBO Max.
While Michael Lombardo, the head of HBO programming at the time, supported Sheridan and the series (he told THR that he thought Sheridan was "the real deal"), the other bigwigs didn't see the vision.
The final straw, Sheridan said, was when HBO urged him to "tone down" the character of Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly), who's since become a favorite of female audiences, in particular. (Jennifer Lopez can attest.)
"'We think she's too abrasive. We want to tone her down. Women won't like her,'" Sheridan recalled to the outlet. "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 stuck to his guns, and HBO fired him:
"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."
The creator kept shopping Yellowstone to studios, and the series eventually landed at Paramount. When it became a mega-hit, the HBO vice president who nixed the show emailed Sheridan about doing a family drama together. Sheridan said he responded, "Great idea. It sounds just like Yellowstone."
READ MORE: 'Yellowstone' Creator Taylor Sheridan Breaks Silence on Kevin Costner Drama: 'I'm Disappointed'
