They definitely made his first acting role a challenge, and it sounds like Riley Green will get very vulnerable for his new role as Garrett in the Yellowstone spinoff Marshals this season. Of course, the new series just aired on CBS this past Sunday, and finds Kayce Dutton, played by Luke Grimes, taking on a new role as a U.S. marshal following the death of his wife, Monica.
The synopsis of the show’s first season, which will consist of 13-episodes seemingly finds Kayce Dutton got back to his violent ways because of the devastating loss that he suffered:
“With the Yellowstone Ranch behind him, Dutton joins an elite unit of U.S. Marshals, 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.”
And spoiler alert, in case you haven’t watched the first episode yet, but it is revealed very early in the episode that Kayce has lost his wife Monica (played by Kelsey Asbille) to cancer, which leads to a rally on the Broken Rock Reservation and sets up the first episode in an action-packed way.
Country star Riley Green will appear in multiple episodes, and he will play former Navy SEAL Garrett, who arrives at the ranch, unexpectedly, hoping to lean on his friends Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) and Cal (Logan Marshall-Green) to help “put the demons of his past to rest.” He wasn’t featured in the first episode, but don’t worry fans, it’s coming.
And during an interview with People, Riley joked that he didn’t decide to do the show because he was sitting around bored and needed something to do, but he was helping Grimes, who is a musician himself and about to put out his sophomore country album Redbird, get connected with some people in Nashville and that’s when Luke had the idea that Riley might be good at acting.
Riley had been thinking he would be interested in getting into acting, and of course he’s starred in plenty of his own music videos, but he played himself and that whole production is on a much smaller scale. Riley explained that everyone on set was very welcoming, and it was a fun change of pace to be on the set of a TV show as opposed to on the road touring.
He met with an acting coach so he wasn’t going into it completely blind, so to speak, and they told him not to “worry so much about the lines” and “to what the other person says,” though playing Garrett came with “a lot of vulnerability” so it was a challenge for Riley to portray a former Navy SEAL onscreen, something he has no personal experience with in terms of being in the military, and he admits it probably wasn’t the easiest character to start his acting journey with:
“He’d been through a lot and had a lot of problems and that’s not the easiest thing to just jump into. I certainly think there would have been characters that would have been easier for me to sort of tap into that were more similar to me.”
Riley explained that Garett had “a lot of deep emotional problems” from his past:
“This guy was somebody that really had a lot of deep emotional problems from things that had happened to him in the past. And when you haven’t lived those, you really kind of just rely on feedback from other people in the room.”
But over time, Riley told People that tapping into that kind of emotion is similar to performing songs onstage, which became sort of a reference point for him:
“When you write a song, you’re coming up with these thoughts for the first time so those emotions are real… But when you go and you perform that song over and over and over again, you have to keep it feeling real, even when maybe it’s not so much. So for me, if I’m playing a song that’s a really emotional song, there is a feeling that I need to get to go and perform it that way. And acting’s very similar in that sense.”
Grimes said at the premiere that Riley is a really good actor, and I’m excited to see his acting chops this season onscreen. Considering it’s something he’s never done before, I can only imagine how hard it would be to start off with such a complex character, but it sounds like producers and writers definitely went for the baptism by fire approach with him. But it sounds like for now, Riley is focused on getting back on the road for his Cowboy As It Gets tour this spring.
When asked if this could be the start of an acting career, Green says he’d love to do it again while he’s not touring, so maybe fans will get to see him act again one day on another show or movie.
I have no doubt plenty more opportunities will come his way, and Marshals is already a hit, as the ratings for the first episode surpassed a lot of Yellowstone’s numbers in the final season, excluding the season 5B premiere of Yellowstone in 2024, which accumulated 16.4 million viewers on its first night, though “that number includes an eight-network simulcast on cable, replays on Paramount Network and a special showing on CBS.”
They reported 9.52 million viewers also puts Marshals ahead of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars finale, which had 9.43 million viewers, for “the largest same-day audience for a network series (excluding live sports and news) so far this season.”
The next episode will air this Sunday evening on CBS, and you can watch the trailer here:
Cowboy As It Gets Tour Dates:
April 16th, 2026 – Southaven, MS – Landers Center#~$
April 17th, 2026 – Louisville, KY – KFC Yum! Center#~$ *ON SALE 10/3
April 18th, 2026 – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena#~$
May 7th, 2026 – Charlotte, NC – PNC Music Pavilion#~•
May 8th, 2026 – Alpharetta, GA – Ameris Bank Amphitheatre#~•
June 18th, 2026 – Holmdel, NJ – PNC Bank Arts Center#~•
June 19th, 2026 – Saratoga Springs, NY – Saratoga Performing Arts Center#~•
June 20th, 2026 – Wantagh, NY – Northwell at Jones Beach Theater#~•
June 25th, 2026 – Noblesville, IN – Ruoff Music Center#$*
June 26th, 2026 – Burgettstown, PA – The Pavilion at Star Lake#$*
July 16th, 2026 – Green Bay, WI – Resch Center#~•
July 23rd, 2026 – Salt Lake City, UT – Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre#~•
August 6th, 2026 – Darien Center, NY – Darien Lake Amphitheater#/•
August 7th, 2026 – Cuyahoga Falls, OH – Blossom Music Center#/•
August 8th, 2026 – Bristow, VA – Jiffy Lube Live#/•
August 13th, 2026 – Camden, NJ – Freedom Mortgage Pavilion#/•
August 14th, 2026 – Hartford, CT – The XFINITY Theatre#/•
August 15th, 2026 – Bangor, ME – Maine Savings Amphitheatre#/•
August 21st, 2026 – Sioux Falls, SD – Denny Sanford#$*^
August 22nd, 2026 – Grand Forks, ND – Ralph Engelstad Arena#$*^
#Justin Moore
~Drake White
$Mackenzie Carpenter
•Hannah McFarland
*Adam Hood
/Zach John King
^Not A Live Nation Show
