Many fans absolutely adore Ed Harris’s role as Everett McKinney on Dutton Ranch, but the 75-year-old actor doesn’t seem to share their opinion.
On Monday, July 21, Ed voiced deep displeasure with his Dutton Ranch role while walking the premiere carpet for his Apple TV project, The Dink, which drops Friday, July 24.
When asked by Marc Malkin from Variety how many seasons he’s signed up for, Ed begrudgingly stated, “Two.” He went on to reveal that midway through the first season, he was asking his team to “get me the **** out of here.”
The reason? He felt overpromised and underutilized. “I felt misled,” he admitted, noting that what made him sign on in the first place was the idea that he’d be one of the four main characters of the Yellowstone spinoff. “That wasn’t really the case,” he said.
Unhappy with his predicament, he approached production and voiced his concern, telling them that he felt “underused and inconsequential.”
While Ed is on board for filming to begin in February, he’s not confident that season 2 will be much better for him. “I’m being told that my character will have a little bit more to do… it just was a little frustrating, to tell you the truth,” he told Variety. “When I watched it—I watched the season, and it’s fine; I thought it was pretty good; I felt fine about what I did in it, and seeing that I was relatively important to the story, but the doing of it didn’t feel that way.”
The thing that upset him the most? He was told he’d get to sing in the series in the first or second episode, but after filming the scene, they ended up cutting it because it didn’t match that dark vibe they were closing the episode with. “So there’s this scene in there… I walk up to the mic, and they cut it. They cut the song out. I’m going, ‘**** you, people,’” he recalls.
At that point, Ed admitted that he had “enough reason to say I’m voiding my contract.”
After fans caught wind of the red carpet interview, certain revelations began to surface. “Sounds like maybe Kevin Costner’s differences with Taylor Sheridan may have been valid. Don’t **** with Ed Harris. This man is the real deal and has portrayed the kindness to the meanest and heroic characters in movies. Team Harris,” one Instagrammer commented on the clip. “And that, my friends, is a gentle lead into why Costner went the direction he did,” someone else commented.
Here’s hoping that Ed’s candid conversation with producers and on the carpet leads to a shift for his character in season 2. It’d be a real shame if he gets immediately killed off and we only see his feet in the frame. Been there, done that, no thanks.