Kevin Costner: “The patriarchs are kings not yet fallen”

Kevin Costner's taste for westerns did not come out of nowhere.

Her paternal grandfather, a native of Oklahoma, was half-Cherokee.

The Far West, the immense landscapes, the Indian tribes, their unique relationship with nature, the arrival of settlers, expropriations, the Civil War, are the material on which he drew inspiration.

The actor has made it his favorite genre.

Better, he made it his passion.

,

,

, or

, at the movies.

miniseries and

Paramount+'s hit family saga,

, for television.

Located in Montana, not far from the park whose name it bears, the fiction relates the battle led by the Duttons against real estate developers and local politicians to keep the land they have owned for more than a hundred years.

John Dutton (Kevin Costner) and his children run the largest ranch in the United States.

For how much longer ?

The series, which already has 5 seasons, is one of the most watched programs in the United States.

For Costner of course, but also for her qualities and the political, historical and environmental issues she develops.

And if it seems that the star has decided to leave the ship for agenda issues and moved by the desire to do something else, he will nevertheless be the one by whom this success arrived.

For his performance, he himself received the 2023 Golden Globes for Best Actor in a Drama Series.

As for the series, it gave birth to the prequels

and

(April 2 on the platform), to which

, a new ranch story, this time set in the present time.

TV

Kevin Costner.

- Taylor Sheridan is not just an outstanding series creator.

He is also a specialist in the Great American West.

I didn't disdain the idea of ​​participating in a series, as long as the role was interesting.

He knew my taste for westerns and had very specific ideas in mind.

In short, we talked at length about how to tell a story that fascinates, built on the limited base of intra-family relationships as a pretext to approach many aspects of the history of the United States.

But still ?

The report of the daily life of the Duttons, of which I play the patriarch, the war they are forced to wage against their neighbors, makes it possible to evoke the very current and very politicized questions of the spoliation of the Indian territories during the conquest of the West, the preservation of the environment, the survival of large family farms, the very fragile interactions between groups of individuals or even the greed of real estate developers, ready to do anything, despite the tightening of certain laws, to acquire land that is unbuildable.

Texas, Oklahoma, Montana are places steeped in history.

Many of our ancestors lost everything there, died there, suffered there… And this story, this story that seems so foreign to many Americans, is our fundamentals.

Yellowstone

Hatfields and McCoys

is inspired by real events and was co-produced and broadcast on a channel dedicated to History.

So yes, literally.

is pure fiction.

Its postulate nevertheless remains very, very linked to what I mentioned above.

It therefore also has a pedagogical, if not didactic, scope.

I fight for that.

Does playing the patriarchs provide any particular pleasure?

Obviously !

My character is very far from that of Joke Ewing from Dallas, and at the same time not so much.

They are kings, kings not yet fallen, at whose feet children, brothers, wives, associates, lifelong friends, more or less faithful, engage in a very strange, terribly human dance.

At the slightest tremor, the dull conflict explodes, rivalries reawaken, the wounds of the soul reopen.

And it's war… Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille, and so many others since, have portrayed it magnificently.

therefore meets three of my favorite criteria: the western, the family saga and the history of the United States.