Luke Grimes has never sugar-coated how hard it was to finish Yellowstone yet he still frames Kevin Costner’s exit as simply one more obstacle in a long list of them. The final season already carried the weight of a two-year gap between its two parts and a mountain of public speculation about what had gone wrong behind the scenes. Costner’s absence from Part 2 forced Taylor Sheridan to write John Dutton out in abrupt fashion and the decision left some fans feeling the character deserved a more dignified exit. Grimes, who played John’s son Kayce, has been open about the practical difficulty of shooting without the series’ central patriarch. At the same time he refuses to treat the departure as uniquely catastrophic. In his view every single season of Yellowstone had already demanded that the cast and crew climb over some major hump just to reach the finish line.

Looking back he lists the obstacles with the calm of someone who has lived through all of them. COVID disrupted early production the strikes created further delays and each year seemed to arrive with its own large-scale complication. Costner leaving simply became the latest entry on that list rather than the defining crisis of the entire run. Grimes still calls the experience of playing Kayce one of the most fulfilling of his career even while acknowledging that the job never got easier. The ability of the show to stay on course through all of those disruptions still strikes him as something close to a miracle. That perspective keeps the focus on collective endurance instead of any single personality clash.

He has been careful to separate the personal admiration he felt for Costner from the logistical reality of finishing the story without him. Working opposite an actor he had respected for years carried its own weight and the sudden change in the final season required everyone to adjust. Yet Grimes repeatedly returns to the idea that the production had already survived bigger external shocks. By placing Costner’s exit in that longer context he downplays the narrative of irreversible damage that dominated much of the online conversation. The work itself continued and the scripts still had to be shot. In the end the measure of success became whether the remaining cast could still deliver a coherent final chapter rather than whether every original piece remained in place.

Sheridan’s handling of the conclusion earns particular praise from Grimes who believes the writer found a way to close the multi-generational arc with real satisfaction. The ending tied back to the longer history established in 1883 and gave the Dutton saga a sense of full-circle completion that many viewers found earned. Grimes is confident that fans who stick with the final episodes will walk away happy with how the story lands. That confidence is notable because it comes from someone who lived through the practical headaches of the last season and still walked away proud of the result. The focus stays on the finished product rather than the turbulence that preceded it.

At the time of the interview Grimes was still speaking as if Kayce’s story had reached its natural end and he sounded genuinely content with that idea. He described feeling excited about an open road for the first time in years and the freedom of not knowing what the next acting job would be. The comments came before Marshals was formally announced and they capture a moment when the actor believed he might finally step away from the Dutton world. The fact that he later returned for the spinoff only underlines how carefully he weighed any continuation. Even then the original instinct was to treat the Yellowstone finale as a clean and satisfying close.

The larger Yellowstone universe was already expanding in several directions while the original series wrapped. Spin-offs like Dutton Ranch promised to continue the Beth and Rip story while other projects explored entirely new families inside the same Montana landscape. Grimes’s own future project would eventually bring Kayce back in a very different professional context yet at the moment of the Holler conversation that possibility still felt distant. His measured comments about Costner’s departure fit the same pattern of refusing to let any single disruption define the entire experience. The show had always required resilience and the final season simply asked for one more round of it.

What emerges from Grimes’s account is a working actor’s practicality rather than a participant’s score-settling. He does not pretend the absence of Costner made the work easier and he does not claim the final season arrived without real friction. At the same time he refuses to elevate that friction above the long list of earlier challenges that had already tested the production. The miracle, in his telling, is that the series still reached a coherent ending at all. That framing keeps the emphasis on collective survival instead of individual exits. For an actor who spent years inside one of television’s most demanding ensembles the ability to call the whole thing fulfilling still outweighs the memory of any single hump they had to clear.