“I have a lot of thoughts,” Yellowstone‘s own Jamie Dutton, Wes Bentley, begins of the end of the most popular show on television.
“Obviously, I’m not the writer,” he continues for The Hollywood Reporter in an extensive interview. “But as a viewer, there are so many potentials for Jamie.”
Ain’t that the truth. Arguably, no character has had more intense, zig-zagging arcs on Yellowstone. Certainly, no one else has been treated the way Jamie has by his own family in canon. So when those final episodes of the hit series come, how will the adopted Dutton, our favorite black sheep, go out?
“Does he go down with John? Does John go down because of Jamie?” Will “Jamie have a hand in it at all, or does it turn out Jamie tries to protect him? It’s hard to read Jamie,” Bentley ponders.
Jamie could also be “playing everybody right now,” he adds. For the actor, who’s been in the slipperiest Dutton’s slicked shoes since production began pre 2018, his character is finally “realizing now that he has this power and potential for more power.”
Still, “I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not with him. There are so many potential ways he deals with John’s ending,” Bentley says.
‘It’s so hot and combustible right now that it could blow them all up together’
Still, that doesn’t stop Bentley from pondering those tantalizing “what ifs?”
“It’s so hot and combustible right now that it could blow them all up together. I think the potential for that is real. But I also know that I am always surprised by Taylor [Sheridan] and the turns and directions. I’m kind of waiting for whatever extra thing he is thinking about that I’m not thinking about,” he muses.
But considering the tension and danger built by the first 8 episodes of Yellowstone Season 5, “it potentially could be either they are all gone, or one of them survives.”
The “breakthroughs” Jamie had in those episodes also brought a lot to the table for Bentley, even after five years of playing this character. “That moment where he decided that it doesn’t matter what I get or don’t get in this life… That he’s going to go out like a cannonball maybe. Just blow it all up.”
It’ll be Jamie vs Beth in ‘Yellowstone’s Finale, regardless of what happens to John Dutton
As for how Kelly Reilly’s indominable Beth Dutton factors into all this, Bentley says he thinks about this “all the time.”
“I picture Beth going for him. She’s done with Jamie,” he continues for THR. “I can’t imagine it’s anything other than: ‘We have to take him out, for real.’ And discussing how to do it. So, that brings me fear.”
Still, “there was a switch in him,” he notes of Jamie. “So with that forward momentum, it seems hard to avoid that he’s on the attack,” too.
Will we finally see Jamie get his own twisted form of justice? And if he does, would it be any more twisted than what Beth or their father, the exiting Kevin Costner’s John Dutton, planned?
Regardless, Wes Bentley is a realist, it seems. “I have enough experience in this business to know that, even when things are going well…” he says before cutting that thought short to mention another show that’s oft compared to Yellowstone.
“Succession is a good example; it’s peaking and ending at the same time. I’ve always been prepared for some version of the show ending or I’m out of it, or Kevin decides to go do other things and he’s out. You just know the business and always expect the craziest thing to happen. And often, it does.”
Again, ain’t that the truth.
Wes Bentley and Kelly Reilly will return for the final episodes of Yellowstone. The jury is still out on Costner, however.
Major thanks to THR for a fantastic interview with Bentley. For more on what’s to come for the franchise, see Every CONFIRMED ‘Yellowstone’ TV show coming our way next.