Kevin Costner is so heavily associated with the Western genre that he not only departed the most epic Western saga of recent years, but did so in order to make his own epic Western saga. The Dances With Wolves and Open Range legend had, in recent years, been the face of TV smash Yellowstone – the Taylor Sheridan series that became a ratings juggernaut, and spawned an entire universe of spin-off shows set in different eras of American history. But before the show's end, Costner departed the role of John Dutton III, partly in order to direct and star in his multi-part movie Western series Horizon: An American Saga. With the largely self-funded Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 hitting cinemas soon, Yellowstone fans will get their Costner Western fix – but as it stands, the star won’t appear in the upcoming final run of the TV smash.
Not that Costner is against a return to Yellowstone down the line, should the show extend beyond its supposed finale. “I think it’s possible,” he tells Empire when questioned about the idea of coming back to the series. “Who’s to know what a final season is anymore these days? I did five seasons of it. I would love to come back and do it, but it really depends. There are so many other universes [other Yellowstone shows] that are coming out, that maybe they’ll circle back to that, maybe they won’t. I don’t know what they’ll do, but I’m absolutely open to it.” Those other Yellowstone series include the Sam Elliott-led 1883, Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford’s 1923, and the proposed 1944 and present-day-set 2024.
Either way, it sounds like Costner won’t be back in the final part of Season 5. And as for crafting his own Western opus, all those years on Yellowstone didn’t help prepare him for the challenge of making Horizon. “Nothing helps you out,” he admits. “You get up in the morning, you just have to do it. You have to deal with the weather, the money is finite, you have to deal with that. You have to deal with things that move slow, like wagons, horses, cattle. It will drive you nutty, man.” Even the making-of sounds like an epic Western saga.
Read Empire’s full Horizon: An American Saga interview with Kevin Costner – talking the films’ inception, creation, and ambitious release plan – in the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice issue, on sale Thursday 6 June. Chapter 1 hits UK cinemas on 28 June, with Chapter 2 arriving on 16 August.