The hit series Yellowstone is finally making its return to TV.
Fans are excited to see how the show wraps up its final season.
And Taylor Sheridan revealed one surprising detail about Yellowstone that caught fans off guard.
Hard work goes into preparing for a season of Yellowstone
The Paramount Network series Yellowstone has started airing the second half of the show’s fifth and final season.
Yellowstone’s last episode aired on January 1, 2023, which has left fans waiting for the show to return after delays from the Hollywood writer’s strike.
The show became a sensation after it debuted in 2018 for portraying the Western lifestyle on the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch.
Attention to detail is one of the reasons the series has become a success.
The show is filmed on location in Montana.
Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan features cowboys, so he wanted to ensure they knew what they were doing and for their performance to seem authentic.
He created a cowboy boot camp on his ranch in Texas for the show’s actors to learn how to ride horses and learn the ropes of ranch work.
“Most Westerns you’ve ever seen, it’s a bunch of horses running in the distance together, and then it cuts to a bunch of actors sitting on fake horses; who wants to watch that?” Sheridan told CBS Sunday Morning. “That allows me to make a better product when filming it. I have happier actors and happier horses.”
Even actors on the show who know how to ride or have been through the boot camp have to attend.
“To do this role, it requires serious saddle time,” Sheridan explained. “From different disciplines, whether it’s reining or whether it’s, you know, cutting, those are things you have to get in the saddle and do. Repetition is a big deal. Right now, it’s day two; I think my ears are sore. I’m that sore right now.”
Actors have gotten hurt training for Yellowstone
The actors on Yellowstone make riding look easy on TV but they put in hard work and sometimes pay the price physically to get to that point.
Actor Cole Hauser who plays Rip Wheeler on the show told the Whiskey Riff podcast that Jefferson White who plays Jimmy Hurdstrom was injured from horseback riding.
“I mean . . . he went through hell, poor guy,” Hauser said. “He couldn’t ride really after day one because he had torn a piece of his . . . taint just by riding too much in one day. Yeah, it was bad; he was bleeding. It was horrible.”
Sheridan explained that the cowboy boot camp would help the show’s actors deliver a better performance.
“The purpose of cowboy camp is to get actors comfortable enough on the horses that they weren’t nervous when riding,” Sheridan said. “The better I can make them as a rider, the more they understand the thing they’re acting out.”
Yellowstone’s cast is putting in the hard work of learning to ride horses so they can deliver a realistic performance.
This authenticity has helped turn the series into a wild success.
