Kevin Costner forced Yellowstone actor Lee Dutton to dye his hair

“Yellowstone” and “Succession” are not Really They may be like-minded people, but it's easy to understand why people still tend to compare them. In a sense, both series are family dramas centered on a King Lear-esque patriarch whose children are fighting for control of their inheritance – the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch in the case of Taylor Sheridan's hugely popular neo-Western drama. competing and defending themselves at the same time, the vultures circle from outside. Personally, I could even imagine a crossover where Connor Roy from Succession, after years of hanging out at his own fancy “ranch” in New Mexico, tries to take over the Duttons' land in hopes of being his Salt of the Earth to strengthen public image for his next presidential bid, which is sure to fail. (You know the Conheads would totally eat this nonsense up.)

Both series also begin with an unexpected disruption in the lineage. In the case of “Yellowstone,” it's the shocking death of eldest son Lee Dutton (Dave Annable), cowboy hat-wearing family man John Dutton III (Kevin Costner), in the series' first episode, “Daybreak,” that ends the Dutton clan thrown into turmoil. Since his efforts to prevent Lee from being permanently killed proved unsuccessful, this also meant that Annable missed out on a recurring role in one of the most watched (perhaps) films The (most watched) TV series of the streaming era. On the bright side, he managed to impress Sheridan enough that the prolific writer/producer gave him a much more prominent role in his hit spy thriller show Lioness.

Additionally, the CIA drama has finally allowed Annable to adopt his natural salt-and-pepper hair color in Sheridan's Dad Television Universe (that's what we're calling his many, many series for now) – something the actor wasn't allowed to do during his short time on Yellowstone at Costner's request.

While it's completely natural for a 40-year-old like Annable to have more salt than pepper when it comes to his hair tones (…wrote the person staring at the middle-aged barrel), It seems the 60-year-old Costner in “Yellowstone” wasn't content with having a graying son on screen. Annable explained to People that he didn't have to get his hair dyed for “Lioness” in the show's second season premiere, recalling:

“I asked for it (to keep my natural hair color) and they said yes to this one. I asked 'Yellowstone,' and God bless Mr. (Kevin) Costner, he said, 'No – you're going to color it.' I don't want to look so old.' I thought, 'Oh, okay. That makes sense.'”

However, John Dutton III is said to be just a few years younger than Costner (who was 63 when “Yellowstone” debuted in 2018), so it certainly wasn't outside the realm of possibility that his eldest son would have already been by the time we met him, he turned gray. There's also something to be said about how this is a missed opportunity to better normalize the way people actually age in film and television, and that Costner might have done well to let go of his ego a bit and embrace allow yourself to actually look older than someone else just like Harrison Ford did until the 90s. At the very least, this would have added to the series' realism in portraying modern American ranchers.

Then again, Yellowstone has always been more about soapy melodrama than being fairly accurate, so it's perhaps a little silly to expect such subtle verisimilitude here. Be that as it may, we will find out what fate awaits John and the rest of the surviving Duttons when Yellowstone Season 5, Part 2 premieres on November 10, 2024 on Paramount Network.