Luke Grimes has worn Kayce Dutton’s boots for nearly a decade. First introduced in Yellowstone, the epic neo-Western series about the family behind the largest cattle ranch in Montana, the youngest son of patriarch John Dutton III (Kevin Costner) evolves from living under his father’s thumb to building up a life of his own and finding peace with his wife and son. As the show’s success skyrocketed, it launched a franchise of prequels and sequels and cemented creator Taylor Sheridan as a force in Hollywood. Before Season 1 had even started shooting, Grimes made a trip to Boot Barn outside of Los Angeles to pick up a pair of Ariat boots, wanting to be ready for cowboy camp after landing the role. As luck would have it, the costumer liked them, bought a few extra pairs, and Grimes is still wearing the same boots, hat, and jacket while leading CBS’ Yellowstone sequel spin-off Marshals.
“The jeans are a little different. I think I was just skinnier back then. But everything else still fits,” Grimes jokes on a sunny day in New York as we talk about the character that he has become most closely associated with — and one that is clearly very special to him. Wearing a plaid Pendleton and looking as if he could have just stepped off a ranch, even though Season 1 has already wrapped, doesn’t feel especially surprising. After all, he has played Kayce through five seasons of Yellowstone and now 13 episodes of Marshals, which has since been renewed for Season 2. Landing the role of the former Navy SEAL-turned-rancher marked a turning point in his life and career — one that has made him more recognizable, but also brought a sense of stability in an unpredictable industry.
Since first becoming a Dutton, he also moved to Montana, got married, had a child, and, by his own account, became a completely different man.
Grimes Is Ready To Play Kayce Dutton for As Long as They’ll Let Him
Before filming began on Yellowstone, Grimes wasn’t quite sure what he’d gotten himself into. He arrived in Montana during a massive wildfire, with ash in the air and zero visibility of the mountains. “I remember thinking, ‘Why are we shooting here? This place is ugly.’ And then, the day before we started, it rained, and it cleared all the smoke out of the air. I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this place is absolutely gorgeous.’” That’s where his Yellowstone ride began.
When the series wrapped, five seasons and 53 episodes later, Grimes was convinced he had closed the book on Kayce Dutton and was done forever. “There was no part of me that thought I was going to be going on with any sort of a spin-off,” he says. “For me, it was the last day of Yellowstone. It was like saying goodbye to family. I remember Kelsey [Asbille] and I gave little speeches telling everyone, ‘Thank you,’ and what a beautiful experience it was. Kels was so choked up that she could barely talk. That’s how much it all meant to us. I’ll be lifelong friends with some of the people I worked with there. It was the end of a really beautiful chapter in my life.”
When the series wrapped, after having made it out the other side of the reported feud between Sheridan and lead Kevin Costner that resulted in the actor and character’s departure, Grimes was ready to bid Yellowstone farewell. But it turned out that his character wasn’t ready to let him go. The initial pitch of “How about doing a Kayce Dutton procedural?” wasn’t something he was immediately sold on the prospect of.
“I thought it sounded like a really bad idea,” he admits. “I didn’t really, truly know what procedural meant, so I called my friend, and he explained it to me because he’d done one. He said, ‘Dude, that’s going to be a lot of work. It’s a lot more work for you, especially to be the lead of a procedural.’ I was worried about it because it was the unknown.”
After spending five seasons with Sheridan as the driving force behind Yellowstone, Grimes understandably had questions about a Kayce Dutton spin-off on a new network with a new showrunner. What ultimately won Grimes over was a conversation with Marshals showrunner Spencer Hudnut, who brought the experience of seven SEAL Team seasons and a vision for something more than a standard procedural — a hybrid that blends case-of-the-week storytelling into arcs that unfold over a full season or even multiple seasons. “Fundamentally, what it’s about is this team of people, this team of good guys who are going out to find the bad guys. It’s a very simple concept at its core, so the procedural element really works for that.”
I feel very at home with him, and I feel like I would play this guy as long as they would let me.
Successfully pulling off a TV series like Marshals is a tricky balancing act: It has to offer enough Yellowstone history to please longtime fans while still telling a story that’s fresh to new viewers. The challenge is reminding audiences why they connected with Kayce in the first place without alienating those unfamiliar with his family’s complicated history. Grimes was keenly aware of that balance. “That was the needle we were trying to thread. If you like the original show, there’s got to be enough in there that you feel like it’s a homage. But also, if you’ve never watched it, we want you to be able to come in fresh and start from Episode 1 and not feel like you were missing out on anything.”
Once Grimes committed to Marshals, his first day on set was very surreal, reminding him of where it all started. “We’re back shooting on the same soundstage that we started Yellowstone on in 2017.” An actor could easily feel boxed in by playing the same character for such a long period of time, but when Grimes says that he feels really blessed, the sincerity is unmistakable. “There are a lot of characters, over the years, that I’ve played that it would feel like torture to have to play for eight or nine years. But with Kayce, if there was going to be one, it would be this one. I feel very at home with him, and I feel like I would play this guy as long as they would let me.”
When Kayce Dutton Lost His Soulmate, Grimes Had To Say Goodbye to a Dear Friend
At the start of Marshals, which picks up over a year after the end of Yellowstone, Kayce may have gotten back up after Monica’s death, but he’s still a bit lost with that piece of his life now missing. Grimes himself was heartbroken that Asbille, with whom he had formed a close friendship, wouldn’t be part of the series. “I just felt like, if he still has her, and he still has his dream life, then there’s no show and no point in doing it,” he says. “She’s made her peace with it. She understands that it’s the motor for the whole story.”
Monica’s death — attributed to cancer caused by toxic exposure on the rez — also points to a very real issue. Native American reservations have historically and systematically been targeted as sites for toxic waste disposal, leading to exposure that has long-lasting health impacts. The loss of this wife becomes even more poignant when their son, Tate, holds up her photo (one that they got permission from Asbille to use) at a protest about those toxins underneath the land and clashes with his father as he tries to keep the peace.
“This guy has had the most painful thing that could possibly happen to him happen, after everything else that’s happened to him,” Grimes says, as someone who’s really been through it all with this character. “He’s got to find a whole new direction, or he’s going to fall apart. He’s got to go out and fight for good because otherwise, he will be consumed by his grief. There’s something interesting in watching someone have to find the strength to do something like that.”
Taylor would be the first to tell you that happiness just isn’t really an option for Kayce Dutton.
He points to a beautiful, profound memorial service scene on the rez in Episode 6’s “Out of the Shadows” as proof of that. “It’s going to be a second,” he continues. “You can maybe play with people coming into Kayce’s life that have some interest, but it’s going to be a while before anything like that is reciprocated.”
With Monica gone, Kayce’s most important relationship is with his son, Tate, his last semblance of family, and the only person who can carry on the Dutton name. That dynamic forces Kayce to confront something uncomfortable: holding onto his dream of a ranch when it’s not what Tate wants mirrors exactly what his father did to him. Now, with his own dream shattered and Tate still too young to know what he wants, the future feels wide open. “Maybe Tate has to move somewhere, and then maybe Kayce has to follow him. Who knows?”
While Yellowstone often felt more like a melodrama for Grimes, Marshals is faster-paced and far more action-packed, forcing him to realize just how unprepared and undertrained he was to shoot 13 episodes. It’s not a mistake he plans to repeat for Season 2. “Honestly, it was unexpected how taxing it was going to be, physically,” he admits. “We started filming, and the scripts kept coming in, and I was like, ‘Oh, another gunfight. Oh, I’m chasing someone in an SUV on a horse.’ It’s just constant. I was like, ‘I’ve made a big mistake. I didn’t train for this. I did not get in shape for this.’” With the plan to do 18-20 episodes in the second season and shooting set to pick back up in May, Grimes jokes that he’ll have to increase cardio and stretch a lot more. “I want to train for longevity. It’s a marathon and a sprint, at the same time.”
Grimes Never Saw ‘American Sniper’ Coming, but Learned Invaluable Lessons From Bradley Cooper
If you rewind to the years before Yellowstone, that marathon arguably began in 2012 with Taken 2, the action-thriller sequel to Liam Neeson’s hit about a retired CIA operative forever being pulled back into danger and forced to rely on his “very particular set of skills.” Grimes was lucky to make it out of that flick alive, and not because of any big fight sequence, but because he played the boyfriend of Neeson’s character’s daughter. “I was only there for one day,” he says with a laugh. “It was very quick. If you blink, you’ll miss me in that movie. It did not feel like I was in a Liam Neeson action movie. It was a very easy day.” Still, he counts the fact that Neeson was very nice to him as a win.
When Grimes moved to New York at 18 to start learning how to act, then to Los Angeles two years later, he wasn’t thinking of anything other than wanting to “get good.” He read every play he could and studied Shakespeare without any real plan to pursue a particular genre or type of character. But growing up hunting, fishing, and watching Westerns with his dad gave him a distinctly American quality. What he never saw coming was that he’d end up playing a Navy SEAL twice.
“I was a very skinny, not athletic, not badass guy at all,” he admits. “To have someone cast me as a Navy SEAL was like, ‘Are they sure? I think they’ve got the wrong guy.’ I could see the Americana thing, and I could see the outdoorsy guy thing, but the team guy/special operator was completely out of left field for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so honored to do it. I just never saw it coming.”
Working alongside Bradley Cooper also left a deep impression on Grimes. As one of the younger guys in that cast, he found Cooper gracious and genuinely invested in lifting his co-stars — something Grimes deeply admired. “There was no, ‘I want to be the person who’s good in this movie, and I want to cut you off at the knees, so you have no opportunity to steal my thunder.’ I see that a lot. People do that. It’s very weird, diva behavior. They’re not all like Bradley. I learned a lot by watching him. If I ever get to that position, I want to be like that. I want to be that guy, and not the other guy.”
Thanks to Clint Eastwood, Grimes Found His Way to ‘Yellowstone’
Grimes credits American Sniper with leading him to Kayce Dutton. Sheridan saw the film while writing Yellowstone, a reminder that acting is only partly about talent and skill, while fate and timing have a hand in it, too. “I’ve definitely thought about that,” he admits. “When you get the sort of job that changes your life in every way, you think about everything that could have gone wrong. The fact that I get to do what I get to do and play a character that I love — it very easily could not have happened. There was a 99.9% chance that this didn’t work out for me. I try to never forget that.”
“Any time I want to complain about anything, or I feel like it’s too much or too crazy,” he continues, “I just have to remember, ‘Dude, you made a bet that you should have lost, and you won. No matter what, be grateful and know that not everybody has their dream come true.’ And now, with my family, it’s even more like that. I have a beautiful wife and a child, and not only do I get to do what I love, but it provides for them. I do pinch myself all the time because I know how incredibly lucky I had to be for all this to work out for me.”
Grimes Originally Dreamed of a Career in Comedy
While there’s a clear throughline between projects like Taken 2, American Sniper, and The Magnificent Seven, what seems out of place on Grimes’ resume are the Fifty Shades films — Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed. He admits that when he signed on, he knew the books were popular, but didn’t fully understand what he was stepping into. “When I signed on, Charlie Hunnam, who I was a fan of, was going to play Christian Grey, and I was going to be his brother. The attractive thing to me was that I would be working for two days on the movie. I signed on for all the sequels at the same time, and it was two days on each of those movies.” At the time, it made him more money than he had ever made in his life. “It was a chess move,” he explains. “Not that I’m not grateful. It was amazing. I was able to eat for years because of those movies.”
But then, Hunnam dropped out, and they asked Grimes if he wanted to audition to play Christian instead of Elliot, which he knew wasn’t the right move. “I don’t know if I would have gotten it or not,” he says. “That’s not what I’m trying to say. I knew that I didn’t want that level of responsibility on that movie. I was like, ‘I’ll take my two days, but I don’t know if I’d be very good at being the guy on the poster of this thing.’”
