Kevin Costner is a “maybe” on more Yellowstone

Kevin Costner finally said a bit more about Yellowstone, though we’ll be honest—his comments are pretty vague. Amid drama over his exit and rumors he wasn’t getting along with Taylor Sheridan behind the scenes, Costner told Entertainment Tonight that he’d “like to be able to do” the remaining episodes of the fifth and final season, “but we haven’t been able to—I’m not sure how it’s being worked out.”

Costner continued, “I’ve loved making that series. I made five seasons of it. I thought I was going to make seven, but right now we’re at five. So how it works out—I hope it does—but they’ve got a lot of different shows going on. … Maybe this will circle back to me. If it does and I feel really comfortable with [it], I’d love to do it.”

Clearly, it’s not out of the question that Yellowstone patriarch John Dutton makes an appearance in the final episodes. But the show is set to air in November, after which it will spin off into new series 2024. (Never has a series title been immediately more dated.) All to say, if they haven’t got Costner on the shooting schedule yet, they’re running out of time.

But Costner may also be acting more polite about returning to the ranch than he actually feels. He may “hope” it works out, but he also stated during his divorce proceedings that he’ll “probably go to court” over the circumstances of his exit. He apparently had an issue with the shooting schedule breaking the season into “parts”—“A show I was only doing once a year I was now doing twice”—but also “There were issues about creative,” he claimed.

Series creator Sheridan, meanwhile, told The Hollywood Reporter last year that there weren’t creative differences, and that it was Costner’s desire to work on his own Western epic, Horizons, that was the issue. “My last conversation with Kevin was that he had this passion project he wanted to direct,” Sheridan said. “He and the network were arguing about when he could be done with Yellowstone. I said, ‘We can certainly work a schedule toward [his preferred exit date],’ which we did.”

Costner told ET that he “had my own fantasy” of how John Dutton’s story might end (“he needs to be proactive in what happens”). But “that’s Taylor’s thing,” the actor stated. “I said as much to him a long while back, maybe he doesn’t remember. I had thoughts how it could happen, but we just have to see.”