First, the good news: Paramount Network has announced that the final episodes of Yellowstone have started production, with filming currently underway in Montana.
The bad news? Well, that’s just about all we know, other than the fact that these episodes are expected to start airing in November.
Seriously: There’s nothing in the announcement released today by Paramount about whether Kevin Costner will return to play the lead role of John Dutton, owner of the largest contiguous cattle ranch in the United States. (Presumably, Costner is too busy launching Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 right now to actually be on the Montana location.) But, then again, none of the other cast members are mentioned in the press release, either. So who knows?
We are reasonably certain that Forrie J. Smith (pictured above with series co-star Cole Hauser) will return in the role of mustachioed ranch hand Lloyd Pierce, if only because the fan favorite and real-life cowboy mentioned in passing a couple weeks ago at the Dallas International Film Festival that he’d been told to keep his May schedule open.
“It’s all a secret,” Smith said. “They won’t let us have scripts until we get there. But the schedule comes out soon, and they told me I’ll know for sure what days I’m working then.”
Smith — who was at DIFF to promote Ride, the upcoming rodeo family drama in which he co-stars opposite C. Thomas Howell, Annabeth Gish and Jake Allyn — chuckled heartily when asked when he first realized what a phenomenon Yellowstone had become.
Forrie J. Smith as Lloyd Piece and Ian Bohen as Ryan in Yellowstone.
Executive producer and series co-creator Taylor Sheridan “sent me to Hollywood to do some promo after the second season,” Smith said, “and they put me up at the Sunset Tower. Well, I go in, and as I’m checking in. the clerk says, ‘I have a note for you.” And she gives me this note. It says, ‘You do not leave the hotel. Taylor Sheridan.” So I get to my room, I call him, and I ask, ‘What’s up with that?” He says, ‘Do not leave the hotel. There’s a bar in the lobby. You stay there until the car comes to pick you up.”
“So the next morning, we go and do promos and stuff. They come bring me back to the hotel — and I ain’t going to be staying in a hotel all day. So I take no cowboy hat, no boots. The only [cowboy] thing I had on was a buckle. And I walked up Sunset Boulevard, bought me a new pair of Ray-Ban’s and I’m walking back. Then I had stopped in the sandwich shop and some people got pictures and stuff with me and I didn’t think nothing about it. It happens. It’s starting to happen quite a bit.
“But I’m walking down to going back to the hotel and this Corvette Convertible with two guys pull up, ‘Lloyd! Lloyd!’ Stopped right in the middle of Sunset Boulevard, jump out and get pictures with me. And I’m like, ‘Wow. Okay.’”
Next level, right?
“Yeah. So I go back and I call Taylor. And I go, “‘Well, I guess you were right.’”
