Why They Revisited Kevin Costner Death Scene

[This story contains major spoilers from the third episode of season 5B of Yellowstone, “Three Fifty-Three.”]

Time caught up to itself in the latest episode of Yellowstone and, just as director Christina Voros and the cast have been promising, the drama that ensued was propulsive.

“Knowing that’s where we were going, it’s all made sense to me,” Voros tells The Hollywood Reporter of season 5B’s two timelines — the past and the present — merging with episode three, “Three Fifty-Three,” which aired Sunday. “Not knowing where it’s leading I think has left some people feeling like they don’t know where it’s leading — which is the point. You don’t understand the point until you get there.”

The point of arrival was 3:53 a.m., the precise time that John Dutton was murdered. The season 5B premiere had revealed what happened to the main character played by Kevin Costner, who departed the series between seasons 5A and 5B. John died by an apparent suicide, but his death was revealed to the audience to be the result of a murder-for-hire plot launched by the partner of his estranged, adopted son Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley), fixer Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri).

“Three Fifty-Three” flashed back to the night of the murder, showing in step-by-step detail how assassins broke into the Montana governor’s mansion and knocked him out in order to stage his death as a suicide. When John’s other son, Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes), pushes the coroner to reexamine John’s body, he helps her to realize that her initial finding was wrong, and her updated conclusion results in the state reopening the investigation into John’s death, which is now being treated as a homicide.

News that the murder-for-hire plot went awry sends everyone involved into a panic. Sarah and Jamie face each other down in an epic argument, where he blames her for being iced out of the investigation and she accuses him of being irrelevant without his father. But just as the lovers are making up over the phone, the assassins find Sarah and riddle her with bullets in her car, treating her like a loose end. Jamie is left wailing on the other side of the phone line.

Below, in another weekly chat with Voros, who directed the episode written by co-creator Taylor Sheridan, she tells The Hollywood Reporter why it was important to relive John’s death scene in such a “voyeuristic” way with the audience, explains what viewers learned about Dawn Olivieri’s Sarah in her death and shares why Kayce (Luke Grimes) is the only lifeline left for Jamie from here on out.

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So this season has six episodes. We know the stakes are high. We assume, at some point, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) is probably getting taken to the “train station.” And yet, I was still shocked by her death. Can you talk about how you structured this episode to accomplish us not knowing where you were going until the very end?

The structure is all Taylor [Sheridan]. In terms of the execution, it is supposed to be a shock. It’s supposed to come out of nowhere. It is, I think, testament to Wes [Bentley] and Dawn [Olivieri]’s talents as actors and the relationship they’ve created together on this show that you are so wrapped up in the ferocity of the argument that has just transpired beforehand that you don’t see it coming. She doesn’t see it coming. He doesn’t see it coming. So, it was all there in the writing.

I will say, I gasped when I read it. I’ve had folks who have seen it on the team in postproduction who gasped when they saw it. It’s incredibly rewarding to be able to get that kind of response from the audience. It means you have drawn them into a place where they are so committed to something else being the reality that it comes out of the blue and knocks the breath out of you, and that was always the intent.

What’s been so much fun about working with Wes and Dawn together is that, as actors, they are so well-matched. With their talent and nuance and what they have built in that relationship, it’s one of my favorite elements of the show in terms of Jamie’s story. Because he’s finally met his match. He’s met someone who is smarter than him, and there aren’t a lot of people who are smarter than him. So it’s really interested to see the characters raise the stakes for each other, but also the actors raise the stakes for each other.

What was it like filming their final scene together — how many takes did you do and did they make different choices with each take?

Their final scene together was the their face-to-face argument. Working with Dawn and Wes, you sort of have to pull back from continuing to shoot just to see what they are coming up with. There have definitely been moments where I’ve gone, “OK, we have the scene, it’s all there. Let’s just go one more time,” because they always level up and pick a slightly different choice. The difference in how every single take we did changed was something I felt lucky to watch and be a part of. It’s like going to see theater. Every version of every take, they were breathing something different into it. So I don’t remember how many times we did it. I just knew I wish we could have kept going because I wanted to see what they would do next.

We also saw this with Dawn Olivieri’s 1883 character, Claire Dutton, where we didn’t really know her until her death scene. I told Dawn I felt the same here with Sarah: We had no idea how Sarah really felt about Jamie (Wes Bentley), until now. Dawn said Taylor Sheridan wrote her an inch to expose Sarah’s humanity and she ran with it, making choices to explore that in these final scenes.

This episode was such a canvas for Dawn, because of how much vulnerability she chose to play with in every take of their argument. And also, even in the phone call, up until the final moment, there were a million different ways you could have gone. And the difference take to take was her feeling out where to place that vulnerability, where to layer it in. That’s part of what sets up the shock factor so much. You are already shocked because you’re going, “Wait a minute, Sarah has feelings? She’s emotional? Wait, maybe she does feel something for Jamie. I didn’t see that coming.” And then, boom! It’s tragic that the moment you think maybe they aren’t both being played, and the moment you leave room for that consideration, the opportunity is gone.

Jamie had quite an episode of coming undone — Sarah’s death was the icing on the cake. Sarah tells him: When the person who made the name is gone, that makes you a lot less important. Jamie realizes that this episode as he is sidelined from his father’s murder investigation. I want to ask, how self-serving is Jamie? What part of him actually cares about the land, about the ranch, about the state of Montana?

That’s a tricky question because you have to keep in mind that Jamie has had everything taken away from him at this point. You can’t blame him for having his own interests at stake because the only thing left now is survival. His real father is dead. He was at war with his adopted father [John Dutton]. His family, with the exception of Kayce, has basically disowned him. So you can’t villainize him for looking out for the only thing he has left to look out for. In a weird way, it’s commendable that he’s still fighting. But he’s fighting against things that he spent a long time fighting for.

His strategy of fighting for the land and for his family didn’t work because it wasn’t allowed to work. It was not a pure enough solution to the problem for John Dutton to accept and because of that, he starts spiraling into this place where he has nothing else to do but to keep on fighting. I’m not even sure he knows what he’s fighting for, except just purely to survive. This war has erupted and he has taken some irreversible steps because of Sarah’s involvement. There’s nowhere for him to go. He can’t fix it. He can’t fix anything, except for maybe getting out of it alive.

I’m wondering how he even stays alive without Sarah by his side. She was his strength — when he questioned himself, she told him to keep going. What does life look like for Jamie without Sarah pulling the strings? Is Kayce the only lifeline left for Jamie?

At this point, yes. Kayce is the only person who is holding out for Jamie to be the good version of himself. I think part of what is so powerful in the loss of Sarah is that even though you think, from the very beginning, that they are manipulating each other, they are a good team. They are strategically approaching the problem together in a way that gives Jamie a companion that he doesn’t have anywhere else in his family. And it speaks to part of the vulnerability that Dawn has played into the part; you see it not only in the moments in the phone call but also in the way she strikes back at him in that fight by going for the jugular — and saying, “once the person who made the name is gone … .” That’s not a place you go unless you are really trying to hurt someone. And the question is, is it purely manipulative? Or does she feel like she’s being attacked by someone she really cares about?

With Kayce, it’s different. Kayce still sees the brother he’s always known, somewhere. He sees a flicker of that. He’s not ready to give up on that. To consider that Jamie could be responsible for his father’s death erases anything he has known of him before. And so I think it’s more a testament to Kayce’s character and loyalty and love for family that he doesn’t want to let that go, because to cross over to the other side is past the point of no return for him.

This episode saw the past and current timeline catch up to itself. Without any more flashbacks, the drama is propulsive — like you have been saying it would be. The timelines merge at the time of John’s death and in that very moment, you showed both Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Kayce (Luke Grimes) feeling this sort of spiritual gut-punch from afar when their father is no longer among the living. Can you talk about that?

I feel very strongly in gut feelings. I think a lot of people have experienced the sense that something is wrong, especially as it pertains to a loved one. What was tricky about crafting that scene is that everyone feels this thing at the same moment, but you can’t be on five different screens at the same time. So the challenge was crafting it in such a way where that minute that transpires expands to embrace every character’s reaction to it. I’m very interested to see how the audience responds to the episodes catching up to themselves. Because knowing that’s where we were going, it’s all made sense to me. Not knowing where it’s leading I think has left some people feeling like they don’t know where it’s leading — which is the point. You don’t understand the point until you get there. I love this episode so much. It was as satisfying to create as I hope people feel it is to watch, because time catching up to itself leads to that propulsion forward that you’re talking about and, to me, it makes sense of the places we’ve been up until that point that while you were on the journey, you weren’t really sure where you were headed.

Well, if people have been reading our interviews, they would have seen you hint about how you needed to show us what was worth fighting for in those happier flashbacks. So then we see John Dutton’s death scene, which surprised me. Later in the episode, when we follow Kayce to the coroner’s office, I understood why you showed John’s death scene in such detail — we had to see the steps in his murder in order to understand how Kayce would show the coroner that John’s death should be investigated as a homicide.

It’s not something that you could pull off in exposition. It wouldn’t make sense. I also think the violation would not be felt the same way. There is something terrifying about people breaking into your home and putting you in a chokehold, and then murdering you and framing it as suicide. There’s no way that could resonate unless you saw it. In our story, it’s also the last moment we were with John. And to have created this character who is so bold and brave and noble and strong, that the violation of that person being taken off guard when they thought they were safe and experiencing this horrible death, it’s supposed to be infuriating. Beth and Kayce and Wes weren’t there; they don’t know what happened. They’re solving the mystery. But I think it’s important that the audience is there to witness it.

You didn’t have Kevin Costner to show in this scene, so there was a body double. [Costner exited the series between seasons 5A and 5B.] When his death was revealed in the premiere, you spoke about how you didn’t need to see John, because you saw what happened written all over Beth’s and Kayce’s faces. Can you talk about filming this murder scene in a way where you didn’t need Costner?

The question we are answering with that scene is the how, not the what. We already know the what. And it was important to the story that that final moment feel violent but also haunting. Taylor had a very strong imagine in mind of what that final moment was. It was scripted as being down a long hallway from a distance, from a voyeuristic standpoint. And I think it’s very effective. You are somehow, as a spectator, removed and embodying what the children are feeling in their gut but can’t see.

Going back to what you have said about this entire show being about the land … in this episode, Beth tearfully speaks to Chief Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) about the regret she has that she can’t save the ranch, her family’s fantasy; all she can do is slow down its collapse. What did John Dutton do wrong to leave the family this way and what does Taylor Sheridan hope viewers takeaway from this part of the story?

That scene is one of my favorite scenes in the series this season, because it is the first time you see Beth admit to losing the war. Even though we’ve always known the only reason she’s been fighting this battle is as a lieutenant to her father; she has been fighting this battle for him. But it’s heartbreaking to see her acknowledge that in his absence and because of his absence, she can no longer protect the thing that she was tasked with protecting while he was alive. So, it’s heartbreaking.

John Dutton is someone who is so principled and who has such a purity of objective that his downfall may have been being too rigid, too pure, too firm on the totality of what he was fighting to preserve. Jamie offered options that could have helped save it. Beth offers options that could have helped save it. And he wasn’t interested in the gray area, in the middle ground. It was all or nothing. And that moment with Beth and Rainwater is the moment she admits to the fact that between all or nothing, she’s going to be left with nothing. She is powerless to do anything to change that, and is very candid with this adversary of her father’s that she’s been beaten. It’s a checkmate situation. And to hear her say that is just heartbreaking to me.

Mo (Mo Brings Plenty) also pulls Kayce aside in that scene to tell him that his vision will tell him what to do. How will Kayce’s vision circle around in the end; what was important about that scene?

Mo is a spiritual mentor to Kayce and every time he imparts a lesson to Kayce, it’s a riddle. Not because he is trying to be overly complicated. But because the answer is in fact finding the answer. It’s like Dorothy and the ruby slippers; she had the power to go home all along. Mo gives Kayce a question that forces Kayce to find the answer in himself, and that has always been the relationship. So this is the beginning of Kayce looking inwards to find an answer that can’t come from outside of him.

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Yellowstone releases the final three episodes of season 5B on Sundays at 8 p.m. on Paramount Network, followed by a linear premiere on CBS at 10 p.m. Head here for how to stream Yellowstone and read THR‘s show exit interview with Dawn Olivieri.