The hit TV show that fired Robert Redford before he’d even been cast: “You can’t make this shit up”
In the past, television was where actors got their performative reps in before setting their sights on cinema, and while many of Hollywood’s biggest names were lured back to TV by the current ‘Golden Age’ of small screen storytelling, Robert Redford wanted nothing to do with it.
After starring in a 1963 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, it would be another 62 years before Redford was seen on television. Of course, he was already retired from acting by then, his brief role came in a show he executive produced; he went uncredited for his cameo, and it was shot on a closed set.
From the early ’60s onward, his focus was solely on celluloid, and it paid off in spades when he became one of his generation’s defining leading men. At no point did he ever seriously contemplate a return to episodic fare, although he did agree to play the lead in a smash hit series that effectively fired him before he’d even been officially cast.
Having spent six decades in absentia, it seems ludicrous for any network, streaming service, or production company to turn their noses up at having someone of Redford’s magnitude headlining the cast of a long-form project. And yet, when Taylor Sheridan secured him as Yellowstone‘s John Dutton, HBO baulked.
The slow-burning neo-western was initially developed as a feature, but when Sheridan realised it was better suited to TV, he did what any self-respecting showrunner would do: he took it to HBO. A bastion for prestige dramas for what feels like forever, both parties were in agreement that what Yellowstone needed to stand out from the pack was a household name as the Dutton family patriarch.
Sheridan pitched Kevin Costner, who ultimately played the part and won a Golden Globe for his efforts, briefly reigniting his career in the process, but the HBO execs “didn’t see it.” The boardroom had their sights set even higher than a two-time Academy Award winner, and the Yellowstone creator was happy to oblige.
“They said, ‘We want Robert Redford,'” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “They said, ‘If you can get us Robert Redford, we’ll greenlight the pilot. I drive to Sundance to spend the day with him, and he agrees to play John Dutton. I call the senior vice president in charge of production and say, ‘I got him!’ ‘You got who?’ ‘Robert Redford.’ ‘What?!?’ ‘You said if I got Robert Redford, you’d greenlight the show.'”
Presumably, nobody at HBO thought he had a snowball’s chance in hell of landing Redford for Yellowstone, which was a reasonable assumption to make when he hadn’t been on TV for almost 60 years and had declined every offer for an ongoing show or limited series he’d received during that time.
Sheridan had done exactly what was asked of him, which still wasn’t enough. “And he says, and you can’t make this shit up, ‘We meant a Robert Redford-type.'” They told him to get Redford, so he went and got Redford, only for them to move the goalposts and say they actually wanted someone Redford-esque all along.
The Oscar-winning actor, filmmaker, festival founder, and all-around legend had told Sheridan he’d be happy to lead Yellowstone as John Dutton, but when HBO opted against greenlighting a pilot episode, he was ejected from a part he’d never been officially cast in, with Costner eventually stepping in when Paramount gave it the go-ahead.
