Luke Grimes has heard the criticism that Kayce isn’t a Dutton who deserved his own Yellowstone spinoff, Marshals.
“I’m my own worst critic,” Grimes, 42, told Entertainment Weekly on Wednesday, February 25. “I was like, ‘If you take a poll of who people want to have a spinoff, I don’t know if Kayce would be top of that list. I think there’s other characters that they would rather see.’”
Grimes used that as motivation, adding, “So there was a fire under me. Like, it has to be good. If it’s not good, I’d rather not do it. We tried really hard to make sure that any of the original Yellowstone fans would have something to grasp onto.”
He continued: “But if you’d never seen Yellowstone, we wanted this show to make sense on its own as well. I think we accomplished that as much as we possibly could.”
Yellowstone, which aired from 2018 to 2024, introduced Us to Kayce as a former U.S. Navy SEAL who became the new owner and operator of his family’s Yellowstone Ranch. He sold the property by the finale, but there was still more story to tell.
“They started bringing it up when we were filming the last few episodes of the original series. There started to be some offers for a spinoff, and I hadn’t gotten one yet, and I was like, ‘I guess that’s it for me,’” Grimes recalled. “And then I got a call and it was like, ‘It’ll be CBS primetime, and it’ll be more of a procedural format.’”
Despite getting the chance to lead his own show, Grimes was unsure what the story would be.
“In that first conversation with Luke, he was like, ‘Kayce’s happy. That’s not very interesting,’” Marshals creator Spencer Hudnut told EW about working with Grimes on a Yellowstone spinoff. “So we knew that something had to shake him out of that.”
Hudnut and Grimes hinted that Marshals will throw fans for a loop, with the actor teasing, “There’s a reason why Kayce is the only one with the black hat. He’s got a lot going on in his soul. Clearly, he’s got demons, and his arc was trying to heal and find his path. In the original Yellowstone, he did that.”
According to the official synopsis, Marshals, which premieres March 1, follows Kayce as he leaves “ranching life behind to join an elite unit” of the U.S. Marshals while “combining his skills as a cowboy and Navy SEAL to bring range justice to Montana, where he and his teammates must balance family, duty and the high psychological cost that comes with serving as the last line of defense in the region’s war on violence.”
In addition to Grimes, the show stars Arielle Kebbel, Ash Santos, Tatanka Means, Brett Cullen and Logan Marshall Green.
“We definitely wanted to make sure to give it a real story and make it interesting and make it believable,” Grimes told People in June 2025 about Marshals. “If it was just like, ‘Well, he’s happy’ — we’re just going to watch him be happy? That’s not very cool. But I’ll say this, the idea that was pitched to me is very, very good and very interesting and it really roped me in, and I think it will rope the audience in as well.”
He continued: “There’s going to be some familiar faces. There’s going to be a lot of new faces too, so we’ll see how that all feels. To go back into it in a new set of circumstances is going to be kind of [a] transition.”
Marshals premieres on CBS March 1 and airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET.
