Yellowstone is coming to an end after Season 5, and while many fans are disappointed by the turn of events, series star Wes Bentley is feeling a bit of relief.
Bentley recently opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about his challenging role on the beloved neo-Western series, and got honest about how the behind-the-scenes drama has impacted him and his experience working on the show.
For Bentley, playing the morally complicated and often denigrated Jamie Dutton — the son and antagonist of Kevin Costner’s John Dutton, the family patriarch — is something that sticks inside his head after the cameras stop rolling.
“Jamie stays with me. I don’t always want him there!” Bentley admitted. “When I see people talking about Method acting, my experience is that I’m trying as hard as I can to shake him.”
That being said, Bentley admitted that because of the delays in production — due to contract breakdowns and public and private spats between Costner and series creator Taylor Sheridan as well as the recent writers strike — it can get “tricky” when it comes to keeping the character alive in his mind.
“Life happens and it drifts a bit,” Bentley shared. “But I have a feeling it’s so ingrained that once we start really gearing up, it will all just come flooding back, and be overwhelming again.”
Bentley has long said that playing a character like Jamie can be hard because the character might be killed off at any time, and he might not know about it until the scripts for that episode come in. Now, with the show coming to an end, Bentley knows the character will meet a permanent fate of some kind.
“There is both relief and trepidation because we put so much into this. You feel like it’s a part of you. Whatever the outcome is, it’s a part of you,” Bentley explained. “But I am excited to see the culmination of all of this… I’m intrigued like everyone else.”
Bentley admitted that the uncertainty of a character’s fate has been a core element of the show since the beginning.
“You never really know who is going to be in or out or, the way shows go now, who is going to die and what season. You are half mentally prepared for that happening at any moment,” he admitted. “It created a real interesting thing for me with Jamie. Because I think Jamie also feels that his family could dispose of him at any second.”
Regardless of his character’s fate, the show will be coming to an end, and it’s something Bentley has conflicting feels about.
“I’m going to miss the challenge. Every single scene is literally the hardest scene I’ve ever had to do,” Bentley shared. “It will always be there as one of the hardest things I’ve ever accomplished, or tried to accomplish, bringing out all the facets and nuances of this complicated character.”
“So I will miss it, but I will also celebrate it being over,” he added.
That being said, Bentley has no real idea what the ultimate fate of his character is going to be, but he says he’s “open” to the possibility of reprising the character in some future spinoff series set in Sheridan’s Yellowstone universe.
“Taylor has something in his mind about where this story goes and if Jamie fits in, I definitely would be interested in being a part of that. But if it’s the end of the road for Jamie, like I said, I’m ready to wrap him up and celebrate the attempts at accomplishing this character,” he said.
