If you’ve seen the 1883 Season Finale already, you get it…
I mean, did Taylor Sheridan have to go that hard?
if you haven’t seen it yet, you might wanna scroll on through to the next article… and grab a box Kleenex before you sit down to watch it.
For those of us who have seen it… man, what a gut-wrenching finale.
For Tim McGraw, who plays James Dutton, and his wife Faith Hill, who plays Margaret Dutton, just getting through the script was difficult.
So difficult that Tim could barely even get through it.
“When we got the final two, we literally couldn’t read them to each other because we were crying so much… I mean, ugly, boohoo crying. I was a blubbering idiot.
It was just so well-written, so devastating and heartbreaking, but at the same time, so on point and poignant for what ‘Yellowstone’ turned out to be.
It just gives you all the reasons in the world why they fight so hard for that land and and why their family fights so hard for to keep what they have. It just made perfect sense.”
Faith had to take over, but it wasn’t any easier for her either.
“He couldn’t read it because he was bawling. It took me about an hour to read it to him because most of the time, I couldn’t catch my breath I was crying so hard.”
Working with Isabel May, who plays Elsa Dutton, the McGraws had to work hard not to get too emotional about the scenes. As the parents of three daughters more or less the same age as Isabel, it was just too close to home.
Tim tried to avoid going to those dark places in his mind, but had to bring life to the character so it was a bit of a balancing act:
“You do become emotionally invested and you do bring your real-life situation into the way you act. You find that piece of your life or a piece of who you are and you can sort of put it under a magnifying glass.
It does expose all those emotions, and it’s hard as a parent, playing that role… you don’t want to go to any dark places in your mind about your kid.
So you have to keep trying to block that out and still be in the moment with the character that you’re playing and the characters you’re playing opposite of, but the lines do get blurry.”
For Faith, she didn’t even want to go there:
“As a mom, I can’t even allow myself to go there. I cannot. It’s really hard, even now, to talk about, because once the tears start coming, I can’t stop them.
I would tell the directors, if we start going, it’s going to be hard for me to stop. It’s painful.”
It’s definitely a tough balance… as a father and mother, you want to be able to bring that nurturing spirit into your acting to make it real and believable, but you don’t want to go to a place where you’re constantly thinking about your own kids dying to get there.
But it sounds like Tim and Faith handled it with precision.
Although, it wasn’t just their daughter that didn’t survive the finale, it was damn near everybody….
We know that Paramount+ has ordered more episode of 1883 but it’s unclear if that means a full second season or just a few more episodes. They just announced plans for a follow up Yellowstone prequel titled 1932, that will presumably join the timeline when James and Margaret’s kids (with or without Elsa) are grown with their own kids.
“The show will follow a new generation of Duttons during the time of Western expansion, Prohibition and the Great Depression.”
So even though Elsa Dutton has died, the Dutton story is just getting started.
