Note: This story contains spoilers from “Marshals” Episode 1.
Around the time they were filming the supersized final episode of “Yellowstone,” actor Luke Grimes was approached.
Grimes plays Kayce Dutton, the son of John Dutton (Kevin Costner), a Montana landowner who goes to extreme measures to protect his dynasty on Taylor Sheridan’s insanely popular western drama — the most-watched show on linear television, a notable feat for a series airing on the Paramount Network, a channel otherwise known for episodes of “Bar Rescue” and weekend-long marathons of the Indiana Jones movies. In the show’s final years, it became besieged by offscreen drama as gripping as anything on screen, as embattled star Costner walked away from the series (and a lucrative paycheck), leaving the show in creative limbo as it scrambled to wrap up without its biggest draw.
The idea proposed to Grimes was this — his own spinoff that would follow Kayce in a new era of his life, dealing with personal tragedy and trying to figure out his place in the world, this time as part of an elite U.S. Marshals unit. (In the main series he was a former Navy SEAL who worked as a livestock agent and later Commissioner.) This could be the rare “brand extension” that allowed him to dig even further into a character that was clearly beloved by audiences.
But Grimes wasn’t interested.
“I actually didn’t think it would be a great idea,” Grimes said. “I think it was a mixture of being in the headspace I need to be in for that last episode and then the way the story ended for Kayce, I felt like was pretty perfect.”
When “Yellowstone” concluded, Kayce had settled down with his adorable wife Monica (Kelsey Asbille), a member of the local indigenous tribe, and young son, on a modest parcel of land. “He got what he wanted,” Grimes said. “With Kayce’s story they landed the plane perfectly.”
The idea that he would anchor a spinoff — one that would switch genres entirely into a more muscular procedural mode, on a broadcast network no less — seemed like too much of a stretch to Grimes. “Usually when you have a spinoff, it’s at least the same tone or format. I’ve never heard of taking a character from a show and putting them in a completely different style of show, just because it had never been done,” Grimes said.
And if you look at Grimes’ social media accounts from the time that “Yellowstone” ended, it seemed pretty definitive. His time on the ranch had come to a conclusion. “End of an era. Goodbye Kayce. You are a better man than I. To my ‘Yellowstone’ family, thank you for the experience of a lifetime,” Grimes wrote on Instagram, where he has 1.3 million followers.
Then something happened. The final episode of the show aired. And Grimes started thinking about his own life. He had a young son and he started to think, Maybe I should have done this.
Sheridan had called him and vouched for Spencer Hudnut, the creator and showrunner for the new series, who had previously served as a producer on “SEAL Team,” which aired for seven seasons and 114 episodes, starting life on CBS before moving to Paramount+ for its final years.
“He’s really smart and he’s got really good ideas. I’m not telling you to do it and I’m not telling you not to do it, but you should definitely talk to him and go from there,” Sheridan told Grimes. (This is the first installment in the “Yellowstone” saga not to be meticulously maintained by Sheridan.)
“That conversation made me not only feel like I had Taylor’s blessing, but also that he wouldn’t lie to me or try to just get me to do something so that he could make some mailbox money,” Grimes said. He met with Hudnut, who pitched him the central conceit and “the really big idea that breaks Kayce’s world open” — his wife Monica would die.
“I think when I realized that the procedural format could end up being a really cool device to use for an action show, for this team of marshals going out and having these different missions every week, that made a lot more sense to me,” Grimes said.
He wanted to make sure that “Marshals,” briefly known as “Y: Marshals” (a cumbersome preexisting deal with Peacock means that spinoffs, at least for now, can’t have the “Yellowstone” branding), had the same look and feel as “Yellowstone.” “Are we going to put this character in a show that looks really different, because that would be bizarre?” Grimes remembered asking. He was assured that they were going to “follow the same visual bible as we did in ‘Yellowstone.’ ” (They actually ended up filming “Marshals” in the same locations and soundstages as they did for the first few seasons of “Yellowstone.” “It was crazy to be back on that set day one, in the same costume from eight years prior, in the same spot, but with all new characters and all new crew. It felt like a weird fever dream,” Grimes said.)
Grimes also thought back to how, on “Yellowstone,” he never was able to explore certain aspects of his character. “I have a lot of fans come up to you and be like, ‘We just want to see Kayce go full Navy SEAL once.’ In this show, we get to do that a lot. Give the people what they want,” Grimes said.
Everything started to add up to a proposition that didn’t seem daunting but was instead exciting. The hard “no” that he gave during the final episode of “Yellowstone” started to soften. Grimes said that he started thinking, Now, this really could be something interesting.
Doing the show without Asbille, Grimes admitted, was a tough pill to swallow. In the first episode, which aired Sunday, there is acknowledgement that she is gone and that she was poisoned by water on the reservation.
“When I first heard the idea, I was heartbroken because Kayce’s whole arc is Monica. They come as a pair. There was no one without the other and it was almost like a Romeo and Juliet-type love story throughout the whole thing,” Grimes said. “But I also realized when I heard it, that it was the only way for the show to work, because otherwise, why would he leave this dream life to go pick up a badge again?”
Grimes points out that the last time we saw Kayce, he threw his badge into a field. It was unfathomable to the actor that he’d return to law enforcement.
“I can’t put it back on,” Grimes said. “But when he loses Monica, there is no other choice but to completely change his life and his path. Because everything about that ranch now, everything about that house, everything’s just going to remind him of her. Joining this team is the only choice to get him out of his head and out of this sorrow.”
In one of the early Season 1 episodes of “Marshals,” Rainwater (Gil Birmingham, another returning “Yellowstone” cast member) tells Kayce, “You’re not a killer, you’re a protector.” “I think that’s his way to honor her is to try to protect the reservation and be useful to his community,” Grimes said.
And while he might have signed onto “Marshals,” that didn’t mean that his anxieties ended. He was particularly concerned about the show carrying on the same tone and style as “Yellowstone.” “It wasn’t going to be Taylor’s voice anymore or Taylor’s words. And that was clearly “Yellowstone’s,” Grimes said. He considers Sheridan “one of the best writers of his entire generation.” He describes “Marshals” as a blend of Hudnut’s voice, with a host of new characters, and those already established from “Yellowstone” like Kayce and Rainwater.
As for the transition from a mostly care-free cable environment to the ad-dictated world of network television, Grimes said that it wasn’t as difficult as you might have imaged — at least for Kayce.
“If you think about it, any of the vulgarity or things that wouldn’t go on CBS weren’t really Kayce’s things. He didn’t swear a lot. He wasn’t naked in a horse trough. I feel like that was more of like a Rip and Beth thing. They’ve stayed on the streaming platform,” Grimes said, referring to the upcoming spinoff “The Dutton Ranch,” which sees Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser reprise their roles as Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler, set to stream on Paramount+ later this year. “Everybody’s in the right spot,” Grimes concluded.
And is there anything precluding Grimes from stopping by “The Dutton Ranch” or for those characters to visit Kayce on “Marshals?”
“I do know that they’ve set it up in a way, like contractually, where it could happen. It was a bullet point in the contract. They’ve covered their bases in case they do want to do that one day, but I haven’t heard of anything and I don’t think it’s going to be anytime soon, but definitely not out of the realm of possibility,” said Grimes.
While “Marshals” has already been renewed for a second season, set to film in Utah later this year, Grimes said that his one home for the first season is that the dedicated “Yellowstone” fans like the show. It’s as simple as that.
“I hope they’re OK with it being a bit different than the original show, and I hope they like the changes. The dumbest thing we could have done is try to make ‘Yellowstone 2,’ because the main character is gone, which was the ranch,” said Grimes. “We’re not trying to make a continuation of ‘Yellowstone.’ We’re trying to make a completely different show with a different feel. And I hope that old and new fans alike we’ll just we’ll enjoy it so that we can keep doing it.”
“Marshals” airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS and streams the next day on Paramount+.
