It seems like a lot of the Marshals spinoff will find Kayce Dutton navigating life without his wife, Monica… but that wasn’t necessarily Luke Grimes’ first choice for the storyline. The show just premiered this past weekend on CBS, and it of course stars Grimes, better known to Yellowstone fans as Kayce Dutton, in a new chapter after moving on from the Yellowstone Ranch.
During the episode, residents of the Broken Rock Reservation are protesting against a nearby mine that has been dumping toxins into the water, which as lead to a high cancer rate in the community, and when you see Tate hold up a photo of Monica Dutton, who was married to Kayce throughout the Yellowstone series, and it’s a giveaway that she passed from cancer along with many other members of the tribe. Later in the episode, we see Kayce visit her headstone, and viewers also see him talking to their son, Tate, telling him how much Monica “suffered” and that “the only thing more cruel than losing a parent, is losing the wrong one.” So it sounds she went through a lot in the lead up to her death, which I’m sure more will be revealed about as the season goes on.
But in real life, there was actually a lot of thought put into how they were going to kill Monica off, and Luke Grimes said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he was “incredibly bummed” to learn that he wouldn’t be working with Asbille on this new spinoff, as they’ve played onscreen husband and wife for nearly a decade, starting when Yellowstone first aired in 2018 (though they started filming in 2017).
He called her “the coolest actor I’ve ever worked with,” saying they’re still good friends:
“I was not at all expecting that when I got the call that that’s their idea. And I felt two things simultaneously. One was I was incredibly bummed because Kelsey’s one of my really good friends and the coolest actor I’ve ever worked with. We’re really close, and for a while I couldn’t imagine doing it without her. I was like, ‘That doesn’t even make sense.”
He explained that he later realized that after Kayce loses Monica, it does make for a much more intriguing storyline in terms of Kayce’s motivation to become a Marshal and upend his life after finally finding peace when the Dutton’s sell the Yellowstone Ranch to Chief Thomas Rainwater and the Broken Rock Reservation, which is where Kayce, Monica and Tate remain at East Camp, a smaller section of the land that was also owned by the Dutton family, when the show ends.
According to Page Six, Grimes felt like, from that perspective, it made sense to kill off Monica:
“There’s a big story there. A person in that kind of pain could do anything. So at the same time, I did think it was a good idea, even though it was heartbreaking.”
And in an interview with TV Insider, Grimes says he was heartbroken to have to be the one to call Kelsey, but said he said she handled it “like a pro” and it didn’t have a negative impact on their relationship at all. He was extremely complimentary of her and knows she will do “just fine” with whatever project comes her way next:
“I worked up the courage to call. I didn’t know how she was going to feel about it. I had to see how she was doing. We had a great conversation. In true Kelsey fashion, she handled it like a pro and totally understood. She’s going to do just fine. She is so talented, gorgeous, and awesome. She’s going to work. That’s not an issue.”
It sounds like Yellowstone fans who didn’t love Monica on the show would probably love Kelsey in real life, and I definitely thought she’d at least be on the show a little bit in the beginning, but showrunner Spencer Hudnut, who also severs as executive producer and writer, had other ideas for Monica’s fate.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hudnut, who also severs as executive producer and writer, revealed that he, Sheridan and Paramount went a few ideas for the show but he wasn’t part of any of the conversations regarding Asbille. It seems like her schedule didn’t allowe her to participate, and once he learned they would have to kill her off right away, and that would set the scene, so to speak, for how Kayce would move forward following such a tragedy, it became a matter of how exactly they would do it, and Hudnut says he wanted to “honor her death” and “give it more meaning,” rather than just having her killed by some random person:
“It was important to me to honor her death and give it a little more meaning. Of course there’s the version where you really exploit it and she’s just been killed, and he needs the [Marshals] badge to get vengeance for her.
But Kayce Dutton doesn’t need a badge to go out and do something like that. It felt like he would be coming in at a different temperature than we wanted. So as I started thinking about the inciting incident, it felt like tying her death to a real-life issue that we could shine a little bit of a spotlight on [was right].
Our reservations have really high cancer rates, and it’s because of all the terrible things that have been done to them. So that felt like a way to honor that character, and she is kind of guiding Kayce.”
They were also able to get Tate involved, and they’re able to show how Tate and his dad are on very different journeys with their grief, which is an interesting element of the show, especially now that Tate is a teenager and that also changes the dynamic of their relationship. We’ll see both Tate and Kayce try to tackle their grief as the season goes on.
Of course, what happens at the rally sets up an action-packed first episode, but I won’t reveal all of that in case you haven’t had a chance to watch it yet.
Marshals airs on CBS on Sunday nights, and you can stream it on demand on DIRECTV or Paramount+. Check out the trailer here:
