The new trailer for Paramount Network’s Yellowstone is eerie, haunted, sere and scary. Kevin Costner‘s voice matches the scene — it’s also eerie and haunted. “Ranching is the only business where the goal is to break even — to survive another season,” Costner intones, and the look on his face says that maybe Hollywood is like that too. Costner has survived season after season. Costner’s journey has been long — starting out as a corpse in The Big Chill and later winning an Oscar for directing Dances With Wolves, in which he starred. He made some cult favorites like Bull Durham and Tin Cup, but his leading man days vanished. He seems in Yellowstone to have gained gravitas in the grind.
Writer/director Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Sicario) gives Costner the material and the setting he needs — the hard, hard ranch life in Montana. Make that a BIG ranch. The biggest in the US, run by the Dutton family and patriarch John Dutton (Costner). Costner has been in this territory before, sort of, dancing with wolves, but what has happened to him in between has transformed his voice, it seems. He danced in South Dakota, but he fights in Montana. “All men are bad,” says one character, “but some of us try real hard to be good.” That, in a nutshell, is the character Kevin Costner has been playing for a long time. Yellowstone is coming to Paramount — formerly SpikeTV — in June.
