‘Yellowstone’ star Josh Lucas reveals the Dutton family ‘nuclear bomb’

Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone is an emotional journey, and Josh Lucas understands that better than most. Breathing life into a young John Dutton, Lucas has felt both love and pain on a magnitude so vast that it changes everything around him. Pain is a driving force behind some of the actions of the Dutton family, and a lot of it relates to one crucial moment.

Labeled a drama or neo-western, fans know that Yellowstone is also a sometimes sordid yet always sultry romance driven forward by powerful and almost painfully attractive characters. The series’ intimate and familial relationships are truly at the heart of the story Sheridan is telling. Yellowstone is brought to life through a lens that allows audiences to find something to relate to, even if we don’t want to — and one of those underlying themes is loss.

Loss is something that plagues all of us, and the Duttons are no strangers to it. In fact, death is an old friend of the family that visits far more often than they’d like; and always overstays its welcome. There’s one death, however, that seems to have been the catalyst for the versions of the characters we know now, ones who have survived the most painful heartache death can leave.

Speaking to Den of Geek, Lucas reveals what broke the Dutton family, not just rendering them helpless for a window of time but destroying them completely.

“I do think I try to ignore it. It doesn’t necessarily inform the way that I’m attempting to honor Kevin or even play John in a different phase of his life. I do think the weight of the death [of his wife, Evelyn] is so heavy on John at that point. I think it’s lightened up over the years, but I think, at the younger point in his life, he’s a broken man. I hope Taylor writes some stuff for Gretchen [Mol], me, or the family in that pre-death mode because I think it would be extraordinary to see them when they weren’t damaged. The damage of that death was a nuclear bomb to that family.”

The loss of Evelyn Dutton is one of the most important pieces of the Dutton family puzzle, and the most exciting thing is that there’s still so much of that to be explored, and that’s where Lucas comes in.

He brings a version of John to life that’s nothing like the character Kevin Costner plays. While the Yellowverse hinges on Costner’s John Dutton, Lucas plays a vital role as he guides us through the pieces of the puzzle that led Costner’s version of the character to the plane he exists upon today. Without his side of the story, the John we know and love in the current timeline would be harder to understand, harder even to try to find sympathy or empathy for.

Further elaborating on the difference between where the character was and where he is today, Lucas explains that a lot of that comes from conversations with showrunner Taylor Sheridan, many of which were spurred by his own important questions.

“So, we had really interesting conversations about who John Dutton was, 20-plus-years earlier. Was he lighter? Was he heavier? Was he angry? Was he gruffer? Has John Dutton, as he’s aged, become more gentle the way men often do? Or has he become bitter? I asked a lot of questions. I couldn’t just do what we did in the beginning because I felt I had all these episodes and the work that Kevin had done, and I wanted to bring a lot more complexity to it. 

While honoring Costner’s place in the Yellowverse, Lucas allows fans to glimpse the man before all of the profoundly deep hurt, and it’s a treasure. Further proving himself to be as big of a Yellowstone fan as we all are, Lucas’ following comment is also something that fans will undeniably treasure because it’s so relatable.

“The experience of playing [John] is incredibly layered. I dream about it. I dream about it probably once or twice a week. I dream about John Dutton, I dream about Yellowstone. I dream about Taylor. It’s fascinating to me, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.”

There’s something so fascinating about the Yellowverse that it’s consumed a part of Lucas consciously and subconsciously. He is invested in Yellowstone, even in the deepest part of his dreams, and he’s certainly not the only one.