Kevin Costner has been the face of “Yellowstone” since it debuted in 2018. As the head of the Dutton Yellowstone ranch, John Dutton, Costner is undoubtedly part of the reason Paramount’s neo-Western series has become so popular. But it’s not just Costner that has portrayed the Dutton patriarch. Josh Lucas plays a younger version of the character on the series, and was actually approached about the role before “Yellowstone” even shot its pilot episode. This was just one of the elements that show creator Taylor Sheridan had mapped out ahead of time, too.
In a 2022 Deadline interview, Lucas recalled being told how, once the location for the Dutton Ranch was confirmed, Sheridan “walked around and pointed at certain points, and said, ‘This will happen here in season 1,’ and ‘This will happen here in season 2. And here’s where the graveyard goes.'” The “A Beautiful Mind” and “Sweet Home Alabama” actor remembered being impressed with how meticulously Sheridan had his show planned out before it even premiered. What’s more, it seems the show creator had big plans for young John Dutton, telling Lucas that “It’s going to be in the fifth season. The fifth season is where you’re gonna come in.”
That’s exactly how it happened, too. Season 5, part 1 of “Yellowstone” delves into John Dutton’s past more extensively than any of the flashbacks in prior seasons, providing a much more expansive backstory for the character just as star Kevin Costner was wrapping up his time on the show. Last year, it was confirmed that Costner would not return for the long-awaited “Yellowstone” season 5, part 2. It’s fitting, then, that season 5 essentially saw John’s life flashing before our eyes before he departed, as if Sheridan had a vision of Costner’s exit in the pre-pilot days and wrote a visual eulogy for the character years before he actually left the show.
More surprising still is that, despite depicting a young John Dutton throughout the series, Josh Lucas has never actually spent time with Kevin Costner on the set of “Yellowstone.”
Why Josh Lucas and Kevin Costner were kept separate on Yellowstone
There’s a long history in Hollywood of actors being kept separate while working on the same project. James Earl Jones and Eddie Murphy were never in the same room while filming “Coming to America 2” and Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t film a single scene with his “Batman & Robin” co-stars. In the latter’s case, it was all down to scheduling and time-saving. But there have been much more controversial reasons for actors being kept apart on-set.
Thankfully, in Josh Lucas and Kevin Costner’s case, it seems there was no controversy afoot. Instead, there was a much more practical reason for keeping t he actors separate. In a 2021 Collider interview (via Looper), Lucas explained how he and his elder are “almost kept separate on purpose,” and how Costner is “not there when I’m shooting.” He continued:
“Taylor [Sheridan] and I talked about the idea of ‘The Godfather.’ When [Robert] De Niro was playing Brando, he wasn’t attempting to look or act like Marlon Brando. He was attempting to play [a younger Don Vito Corleone]. That’s what we talked about.”
It seems that, put simply, both Sheridan and Lucas were both attempting to keep the latter from doing a Kevin Costner impression with his version of John Dutton. As Lucas put it in his Deadline interview, the two characters “need to have the essence of each other,” but the actors themselves don’t necessarily need to meet in order for that to happen.
Josh Lucas was very much doing his own thing as John Dutton
In the case of Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando, the two actors were never on-set together because they simply weren’t in the same movie. Brando starred as Vito Corleone in “The Godfather” while DeNiro starred as a younger version of the character in “The Godfather Part II.” Still, as once reported by The Telegraph, a major study of De Niro’s screenplays revealed the extent of his preparation, with the actor repeatedly watching Brando’s performance in Francis Ford Coppola’s celebrated 1972 film. So, while the two actors never actually met, De Niro was clearly heavily informed by his elder’s performance.
For Taylor Sheridan and Josh Lucas, however, the simple fact that De Niro and Brando never met while playing the same character provided the key to ensuring Lucas’ John Dutton performance stood on its own. What’s more, as Lucas explained in his Deadline interview, his portrayal was more informed by the conversations he had with Sheridan prior to shooting than anything else:
“I wanted to understand, was [Dutton] darker? Was he angrier? Who was he at that point? His wife’s death was a shattering element in the family that is so destructive to the children. Beth becomes Beth in that singular moment. I think all the different characters, they become broken in a way. And so I said, is John lonely? And Taylor kind of barked at me and said, ‘He’s too busy to be lonely.'”
Now that Costner has left “Yellowstone,” there are a lot of questions surrounding the show — most notably whether it will indeed continue into a sixth season with existing co-stars Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser in the lead roles. But it will also be interesting to see how much Josh Lucas is used moving forward, if at all, now that Costner has departed on such contentious terms.