‘Yellowstone’ Director on That Epic Sibling Confrontation and Response to Premiere Shocker: “You Are Not Supposed to Be OK”

[This story contains spoilers from the second episode of season 5B of Yellowstone.]

Add the latest episode of Yellowstone to the list of epic confrontations between Beth and Jamie Dutton.

The sibling rivalry at the core of the hit Paramount Network series from Taylor Sheridan has delivered some of the biggest gut-punches throughout the show’s seven-year run, particularly when the audience found out that when they were teenagers, Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentely) helped a young Beth (Kelly Reilly) get an abortion at a clinic that performed forced sterilizations without her permission. For Beth, that betrayal was unforgivable and it drives her rage in what has been billed as the epic conclusion of the series with season 5B.

In the second episode of 5B, written by Sheridan and directed by Christina Voros, Yellowstone delivered on the pair’s inevitable face-to-face meeting following the shocking news of the death of their father, John Dutton (played by departed star Kevin Costner). The premiere episode revealed to the audience that Jamie and his girlfriend Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri) were behind the act in a murder-for-hire plot that made John’s death appear to be from suicide. Beth and the characters in the show are not yet privy to this information, but Beth knows in her gut that Jamie orchestrated their father’s death and she needed to be alone with Jamie in a room to get her confirmation.

“I was reading Twitter and it’s strange the number of people who seemed upset that John Dutton was killed off, despite knowing that Kevin [Costner] himself said he wasn’t coming back to the show,” Voros tells The Hollywood Reporter in the chat below about star Costner leaving the series between seasons 5A and 5B. “There were a lot of people who were outraged that John was killed — and you’re supposed to be outraged he was killed. The characters are outraged that he’s killed. So in a strange way, it is the point. You are not supposed to be OK with it.”

Beth’s rage leads her to slap Jamie across the face — three times — and physically bulldoze over Sarah on her way out of her brother’s government office. She calls her other brother, Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes), and tells him what happened, and it now seems inevitable that the siblings will begin to seek their vengeance on their estranged brother Jamie, who also happens to be Montana’s Attorney General.

Below, Voros goes behind-the-scenes of filming this second episode to talk about that face-off fight between Wes Bentley and Kelly Reilly, dig into Jamie’s motivations and possible chess moves as he takes on his family, respond to the audience reaction to the massive Yellowstone premiere — as well as Costner’s reaction — and remind viewers what this show is really about (it’s not just about solving the mystery around John Dutton’s death).

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First of all, have you been keeping up with the audience reaction to the Yellowstone premiere?

I have. I’m interested. The reaction is what I expected. I think any time you come to a final season of a beloved show, historically, you are going to get a mixed reaction. You’re going to have the people who love it down to the last drop, and you’re going to have the people who hate that it’s ending. [Editor’s note: A sixth season of Yellowstone is in talks; but season 5B was announced to be the end.] Everyone who has fallen in love with this show has their own ideas on their favorite characters and how they want it to end. It’s impossible to live up to every single person’s version of how things should have been dealt with.

I was reading Twitter and it’s strange the number of people who seemed upset that John Dutton was killed off, despite knowing that Kevin [Costner] himself said he wasn’t coming back to the show. I think even in the face of that information, people don’t want it to be true. And in a weird way, it’s life imitating art. There were a lot of people who were outraged that John was killed — and you’re supposed to be outraged he was killed. The characters are outraged that he’s killed. So in a strange way, it is the point. You are not supposed to be OK with it.

We spoke last week about how I thought it was a bold decision to approach a story that way, and to deal with [John’s fate] right off the bat. What I look forward to is seeing the response as the season goes on, because that’s where it gets complicated and nuanced and beautiful without the impact of this big chess move at the top of the season. But, the story is not over. You still have the rest of the season and no one knows, really, where that’s going now. A lot of people expected the season to resolve in finding out that John is no longer with us. But when you go there first it’s disorienting: Where are we gonna go next?

Kevin Costner reacted to the premiere; he said he heard his character’s death was by suicide, so he hasn’t rushed to watch the episode yet. “Maybe it’s a red herring. Who knows?” he said. Do you hope he tunes into these final episodes to see how John Dutton’s legacy is handled?

I do. I think he will. We really have built a family over the years. As the Duttons are a family, so are the actors playing them. We have built a story together over seven years of filming from start to finish. I would like to think that he would want to know what the resolution is, not just for him, but for everyone.

The episode was the biggest ever in the ratings for the show. What do you attribute to that?

There has been so much build up. It was such a long hiatus because of the strike. I ran into a number of friends who were confused that it wasn’t on Paramount+, so I actually think that when they do the Live+3 and Live+7 [delayed data] that the ratings will be higher, because there are a bunch of people who took a day or two to catch up. But I’m not surprised. Every season has sort of been a blockbuster explosion of numbers from the season before and because this is the final season, it doesn’t surprise me because you have the time for more viewers to catch up. It’s sort of what happened during COVID; all these viewers discovered the show because they had the time to discover new shows. Going into the season following that, so many more people were following the narrative because they discovered it in that period of time. So I would have been shocked if it was the inverse of that.

I want to dive into filming this episode’s big confrontation scene between Jamie and Beth Dutton [played by Wes Bentley and Kelly Reilly]. I loved Jamie’s surprise that Beth was in his office, because I had the same thought: “Oh, we’re going there; she’s here!” The show answered John Dutton’s fate right out of the gate, and now in week two you get to Beth and Jamie’s first face-off. Why get to this so quickly in the present timeline?

When I get questions about the writing it’s hard because I can’t speak to how Taylor [Sheridan] spins his magic with these scripts. I have no idea how the stories come out of his brain as the well-wrought, infinitely nuanced things they are, considering how many stories he’s telling at a time now. He’s a unicorn; it’s a mystery to me.

But in terms of my feeling about how it serves the narrative, it feels like part of the same approach [as the premiere]. The sooner you get to the inevitable confrontations, the more time there is to complicate and reveal things that aren’t expected. After the first episode, everyone knows there has to be a confrontation with Beth and Jamie; it’s inevitable. So that’s where you go next but, where do you go after that? And I think what’s beautiful about how the season builds is that by answering these questions early on, it leaves a lot more up in the air to wonder about moving down the line.

How many times did you film Beth slapping Jamie, and can you talk about the stunt work there?

Our stunt coordinators on the show are unbelievable: Jason Rodriguez and Jordan Warrack, who works with him, have been with this cast since season one. They are in really good hands in terms of the training to sell that stuff. From a production standpoint, you always have stunt doubles on hand to keep the actors safe, but I would say 98 percent of the time the actors are doing the work themselves. And so it’s a combination of having a great stunt team supervising and the actors taking the initiative to really sell slaps and punches and falls themselves. They’ve been honing that. There has been a lot of physicality in the show. We have not been easy on the cast in terms of what’s been asked from them physically, and every single one of them has risen to the occasion and typically wants to do it themselves.

So that was Wes and Kelly doing the slap stunts?

Yes.

Did Dawn Olivieri call for a stand-in in the next scene, when Beth body-shoves and smacks her character, Sarah, onto the floor?

I think we might have done one pass where she hit the deck and we brought in a double for that. But I don’t think we needed to. Sometimes you want to let the doubles do a pass at it because they’re there, but it’s not because the cast hasn’t sold it themselves.

And that goes down to the opening scene with the snakes [in the flashback timeline]. That was a composite of real rattlesnakes, rubber snakes and then we had a stunt snake who was a bullsnake named Fred. We had a double in case Cole [Hauser, who plays Rip] didn’t want to be handling a live snake. But, he did!

The doubles on the show have been really wonderful. They’ve really crafted their art of imitating the movements to be in the bodies of the actors they are embodying. But most of the time, the actors want to do it themselves.

I spoke with both Wes and Kelly separately during season 5A about how intense their onscreen relationship is and how intense it can be to film their confrontation scenes. What were they like when filming this scene — were they like two fighters sticking to their respective corners when filming? How did they support each other? And, how long did you film this scene?

I don’t remember how long it took. The scene itself, when you’re getting that level of heightened performance, you don’t want to do it over and over and over again. Because there’s no need to. With both Wes and Kelly, they come out of the gate firing with both barrels. Neither of them needs a chance to warm up; they come out guns a-blazing and they bring it every time. So when we do more takes with them it’s more about trying different things; micro-adjustments to see what comes out of it. But they are in it from the moment we call “Action.”

I feel very lucky over the years to have done a number of these really intense confrontational scenes between them. In season three, I got to do the flashback scene that makes the audience understand why the relationship is what it is [when it’s revealed that Jamie helped a teen Beth get an abortion, but he knew the clinic did forced sterilization and didn’t inform her]. So their relationship is something I feel very close to. I feel like I’ve been able to be a part of that journey from the very beginning, and it’s always a joy when you have two actors who are so intensely focused on mining the subtlest nuances of their performance, and they’re always grounding these big moments in something so real. That’s what keeps them from feeling over-the-top; it’s really grounded in the work they’ve done on their characters over the years.

When I spoke to Wes going into this season, he told me that Jamie was already a lost soul before his father died, and questioned where he goes now. In this episode, Jamie seems aimless in terms of what’s driving him. He’s doing what Sarah wants and he’s doing what John and Beth don’t want but, what does Jamie want? When he can’t even meet Beth’s gaze and defend himself, he seems like he’s giving up. But in the next scene, he’s all in with Sarah. So, what does Jamie want?

I think Jamie at the beginning of this season has already lost everything but his name. But when I say his name, he’s lost his father and John wasn’t really his [biological] father. So he’s lost everything but his good name, I guess you could say. His father is gone. He doesn’t have a relationship really with his siblings. He has Sarah, but what’s interesting about that relationship is that it’s sometimes hard to tell who is playing whom, and how much is earnest and how much is a chess move. Jamie has always been a survivor, and in that scene with Beth, yes he can’t lift his gaze up but also, even if he did lift his gaze up, what would come of it? I think in that moment, the only way out is through. And confronting her in that place of grief and rage is not going to work out well, regardless of how confrontational he chooses to be about it.

What I think is interesting about Wes’ choices is that there’s a way to look at it where you say, “He’s showing his hand; he’s showing his guilt.” Is he? Or is it a chess move to get her out of there? Is being submissive in that moment the quickest way to bring that moment to an end?

Then Kayce (Luke Grimes) internally downloads this update from Beth — that she is sure Jamie had a hand in John’s death after their confrontation. He bit his lip so hard it bled. Was that scripted?

It was scripted.

There is a lot going on across his face and Monica (Kelsey Asbille) vocalizes the worry to their son, Tate (Breckin Merrill), when she tells him to keep a close eye on his dad when he goes quiet. How will Kayce begin to reconcile this information that Jamie was behind John’s death?

Kayce is and has always been a soldier. His identity has always been that of a warrior, from the very beginning. His journey has been trying to reconcile his two definitions of what family is, and which side of things to fight for. Can he fight for his wife and son, and also fight for the [Dutton] name and the land? And I think we see him in this moment with a purity of focus and purpose where the first fight to be fought is to get to the bottom of who the threat is. You are seeing him in action mode. The first step of revenge is figuring out who you need to go after, right? And so there is a tremendous sense of focus that you see in Luke’s performance of laser-vision of trying to identify the threat to keep all versions of his family safe.

The flashbacks in this episode captured the quiet before the storm, and romanticized scenes with both Beth and Rip as well as Kayce and Monica. I just don’t know if Yellowstone will let two of our favorite couples safely ride off into the sunset… how worried should we be for them and can you talk about presenting this season in both the past and present timelines. How fast are we moving to a place where the two timelines meet?

I think the flashbacks are continuing to do their job at reminding us all how much is at stake. Reminding us all how much there is to fight for, and reminding us all where our hearts lie as viewers: in these relationships with these characters embodied by these tremendous actors. So, it’s doing two things.

I’ve read that some people are really frustrated by the flashbacks because they just want to get to solving the mystery [around John’s death]. And I think that’s part of the point, right? You are being forced to really internalize how high the stakes are moving forward. Because at the end of the day, yes, John Dutton is the patriarch. But the show has always been about the land.

Even for us shooting it. We joke that the Landscape is No. 1 on the call sheet because if it rains or snows, or there’s smoke, we’re not shooting that day. It is the backdrop to every scene with every character and it’s what everyone is fighting for. So we know what happens to John, sort of. But we don’t know what happens to everything else, yet. And I think Taylor is going into these flashbacks to remind us how close we were to this idyllic version of the world. Yeah, they had to ship the cattle to Texas and Beth and Rip were apart from each other, separated by several states. But everything was OK. And it’s important to juxtapose that against this approach that we are making towards getting answers that help resolve the mystery of what happened to John.

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Yellowstone releases new episodes in its six-episode 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 follow along with THR‘s show coverage, including a week two chat with Wes Bentley.