Luke Grimes hasn’t spoken to Kevin Costner since his surprising exit from Yellowstone.
“I haven’t talked to him since,” Grimes, 40, revealed during a Men’s Health MH Flex interview, which was published on Tuesday, December 17. “It’s not a case of any hard feelings or anything. It’s just, he’s Kevin Costner.”
Grimes said Costner’s star power is the main reason the former costars aren’t currently in touch, adding, “He’s a big deal. I do have his phone number — I just don’t feel like it’s my place to reach out. He can reach out to me if he wants to.”
Despite not ending on bad terms, Grimes recalled the unexpected way Costner, 69, parted ways with the show.
“None of us saw it coming the way it did, and obviously there was news about possible blowups behind the scenes or whatever,” he continued. “But just like in life, man, these things happen, they happen fast, and they’re not predictable.”
Grimes compared the experience to a personal loss, saying, “I lost my father a few years ago. It happened fast, and it was not the way that you would think that that would happen. In life, these things happen and then people have to start making decisions. And in our little Yellowstone world, that helped ramp the show up into a boil.”
Ahead of the Sunday, December 15, finale of Yellowstone, the Paramount Network western had its fair share of drama. The first part of season 5 premiered in November 2022, but the second half was plagued with delays amid rumors of a feud between showrunner Taylor Sheridan and Costner.
“My last conversation with Kevin was that he had this passion project he wanted to direct,” Sheridan, 54, told The Hollywood Reporter in June 2023 about Costner’s plans for Horizon: An American Saga. “He and the network were arguing about when he could be done with Yellowstone. I said, ‘We can certainly work a schedule toward [his preferred exit date],’ which we did.”
Costner chose not to reprise his role as John Dutton for the final episodes of the show. Instead, the season 5B premiere showed the patriarch’s death in a murder-for-hire plot.
“I’m going to be perfectly honest. I didn’t know it was actually airing last night. That’s a swear-to-God moment. I’ve been seeing ads with my face all over the place and I’m thinking, ‘Gee, I’m not in that one.’ But I didn’t realize yesterday was the thing,” Costner said on SiriusXM’s The Michael Smerconish Program last month about his character’s exit. “I heard it’s a suicide, so that doesn’t make me want to rush to go see it.”
While Costner moved on from his Yellowstone days, most of his cast members helped wrap up the show. Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser‘s fictional characters have even reportedly scored themselves a spinoff.
Grimes, meanwhile, has been preparing to say goodbye to his character, Kayce. While speaking with Men’s Health, Grimes reflected on what he liked about playing Kayce over the years.
“The great thing about Kayce is he isn’t really into that old-school masculinity. He’s the vulnerable one. If you’re in a western, it’s probably way more fun to be the cool guy who doesn’t have emotions, constantly posturing, unbeatable in a fight, and all that kind of stuff,” he noted. “Kayce is destructible — he loses sometimes. That’s the much more realistic modern version of masculinity.”
Grimes admitted that it isn’t always easy to get to such an emotional place as an actor, adding, “He goes to war, but he’s not a war hero — it ruins his life, and he comes back a completely different person, and he deals with this PTSD. It’s not fun to go into that mentally, but I think it makes him a more well-rounded, more realistic character, and probably a better role model for people going through similar things in real life.”
He concluded: “And that goes back to Taylor. Taylor loves westerns, but he’s also incredibly smart, so there’s always a little more to everything.”
