\tSPOILER ALERT:\u00a0This post contains spoilers from the Season 5, Episode 12 episode of \u201cYellowstone,\u201d \u201cCounting Coup,\u201d which premiered Sunday, Dec. 1, on Paramount Network.<\/p>\n
\tPour one out for Colby.<\/p>\n
\tThe fan-favorite cowboy always lit up the \u201cYellowstone\u201d bunkhouse, fueled by an easy energy from actor Denim Richards. Paired with that was a budding romance with Teeter (Jennifer Landon), which was cut short by Colby\u2019s untimely death in Sunday\u2019s episode. He went out on top, saving Carter (Finn Little) from a wild horse that eventually kicked him one too many times. Variety spoke with Richards about where he was when he first heard the news of his character\u2019s death, preparing for his final romantic moment with Landon and the joy of acting opposite Kelly Reilly\u2019s Beth. \t<\/p>\n
\t \t\tWhen did you first find out that Colby was going to die?\t \tThat happened in May. I was coming back from Dallas, from the U.S.-Africa Business Summit, and I got the call. I had a very beautifully sensitive conversation with Christina [Alexandra Voros, executive producer and director of the episode], and she\u2019s just such a giving person. If anybody ever gets the opportunity to work with her, I think they will all say the same thing: That she\u2019s just so warm and kind and professional. Of course, as an artist, you\u2019re going through all of these tremendously wild ups and downs because sometimes we feel like we\u2019re navigating the character and the human. So much of our identity feels like it gets tied to both. She said, \u201cI\u2019m here if you need anything.\u201d Luckily, things never got to too much of a down point. <\/p>\n
\t\t\t \t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t \t \t\t \t \t \t\tHow did you prepare for your final phone call with Jennifer, knowing it\u2019d be Colby and Teeter\u2019s last big moment together?\t \tI think the goal is that you don\u2019t prepare for that, right? You don\u2019t look at it as this is going to be the last time, because it\u2019s not as though Colby was planning to die. So I think that if you play the character as if he\u2019s planning to die, it tips the hand of the audience too much. It feels a little bit too contrived, it doesn\u2019t feel natural and organic. As crazy as it sounds, it just should feel like it\u2019s just an everyday occurrence. Early on in my career, I think that would have been a little bit harder for me to be able to do because you\u2019re always trying to separate the fact that you know what the outcome is. As you start to get a little bit older, you realize our job is to service the story and to separate your own personal pride and ego from that. At the end of the day, it\u2019s just another phone call to this wild and wacky person that I guess you just happened to be falling in love with. Because of playing it like that, I think it lands differently because it didn\u2019t feel like the audience saw it coming. \t<\/p>\n
\t \t\tI\u2019m sure there are so many, but is there one favorite memory you have from filming the show?\t \tWe had this scene where it was the first time Kelly\u2019s character comes into the bunkhouse and has a moment with Carter (Finn Little) and Rip (Cole Hauser) and we\u2019re all around the bunkhouse. It was this massive day, there were 13 or 14 of us all in the bunkhouse. It was really beautiful to get these kinds of opportunities with people you don\u2019t get to engage with, because Kelly\u2019s character is doing these other things. So that was a beautiful moment. In between that, we played poker around the table. I remember we had like a lightning strike that had happened, so we had to shut down for over an hour. Ryan Bingham is playing his guitar, and we\u2019re teaching Kelly how to play some type of poker. In those moments, you sit there and go, \u201cMan, we could do this forever.\u201d It\u2019s those types of moments that I will always cherish.<\/p>\n
\t \t\tIs there something you wish you could have done in the series that you didn\u2019t have a chance to do?\t \tHindsight is always great, but I\u2019ve tried to train myself as an artist and professional to live every moment genuinely. The job is to fall in love with the process and don\u2019t get tied to the outcome, because we have to do so much preparation, and oftentimes the outcome doesn\u2019t come to what we want. We do so much work and then we don\u2019t get the show or the gig. If you tie your experience of whether or not you\u2019re good to whether or not you were successful at booking something, I feel like you\u2019re going down a really, really dark place.<\/p>\n
\tI think that one of the reasons this show has been so successful is because even as it was getting more high-profile, the artists that we had on board were still able to put aside their egos and personal feelings to just service the story. I went from being relatively unknown in 2017, and now here I am talking with you guys. Who would have thought?<\/p>\n
\t \t\tYour character had a very noble death, but \u201cYellowstone\u201d has a history of killing people off in wild ways. Do you have a favorite?\t \tEven though I don\u2019t know that anybody died in it, I still go back to Season 2, where we\u2019re just unleashing a bull in a bar and then getting into a massive fight. That was wild. There have been so many crazy things that have happened, and I think that that speaks to the simplicity of Colby\u2019s death, because it is more of what really would happen in the cowboy world. And I think Taylor tried to infuse a little bit more of that this season, that this is a very simple death, but very true to what reality can be for a cowboy and a cowboy\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
\t \t\tDid you have a watch party last night for your last big episode?\t \tI did not \u2014\u00a0I actually didn\u2019t even watch it at all. I watched clips of it later on, but I have been replaying this moment all the time since May, and it\u2019s been emotionally challenging just for me as an individual to be living with it. There was so much excitement coming into this season, so many people saying, \u201cColby and Teeter, they\u2019re finally going to get together, we\u2019re finally going to see that moment!\u201d I felt like yesterday would have just been too much for me. But of course, the moment that I went online and I started seeing the thousands of responses, I thought, \u2018Wow, it really meant something.\u201d \t<\/p>\n
\tWhen I actually watched it saw how Taylor eloquently pieced all of this together, it was a beautiful way to go out if you were going to go out. But I was treating it like it was another day at the office. It was like a stress test for me. If you want to do these things, if you\u2019re going to have a long career, you\u2019re going to probably have one or two more of these types of things. So you\u2019re gonna have to be able to handle them with a level of professionalism and class, and that\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to exercise myself in right now. Otherwise, I would probably be crying in every interview.<\/p>\n
\t \t\tHave you started to incorporate any cowboy gear into your normal wardrobe?\t \tNot really. As much as I love the cowboy lifestyle, it\u2019s not really Denim\u2019s lifestyle. I dress in a lot of African attire, usually. Occasionally I\u2019ll throw on some cowboy boots. It is funny though, because like anytime I go anywhere, somebody\u2019s like, \u201cWhere\u2019s your hat?\u201d Or sometimes they don\u2019t even believe that it\u2019s me because I dress so differently. Just know I took every piece of gear that I\u2019ve worn on that show with me. So the picture that I posted on my Instagram, all that stuff is sitting in my office.<\/p>\n
\t \t\tYou have your feature debut as a writer and director, \u201cThe Forgotten Ones,\u201d set as your next project. What can you reveal about that?\t \t\u201cThe Forgotten Ones\u201d is something that we\u2019re very, very excited about. Right now we\u2019re in that kind of weird, tenuous spot about exactly what the distribution looks like. It\u2019s a historical period piece that I\u2019ll be excited to talk about soon, separate from the tragic, tragic death of Colby Mayfield on Paramount\u2019s No. 1 show, \u201cYellowstone.\u201d [laughs]<\/p>\n
\tThis interview has been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SPOILER ALERT:\u00a0This post contains spoilers from the Season 5, Episode 12 episode of \u201cYellowstone,\u201d \u201cCounting Coup,\u201d which premiered Sunday, Dec. 1, on Paramount Network. Pour one out for Colby. The fan-favorite cowboy always lit up the \u201cYellowstone\u201d bunkhouse, fueled by an easy energy from actor Denim Richards. Paired with that was a budding romance with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-series"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}