Yellowstone star admits ‘we lost our quarterback’ after Kevin Costner exit

Yellowstone star Ian Bohen has compared Kevin Costner’s departure from the hit show to a football team losing its quarterback.

The 48-year-old Californian actor plays rancher Ryan in the Montana-set Western series.

Costner confirmed he was departing the show earlier this year, in part to focus on his own Western movie series Horizon – An American Saga.

Speaking to Us Weekly at the CMA Awards on Wednesday (November 20), Bohen said: “I would use the analogy of a football team. If your quarterback gets hurt and he has to come out of the game, you have to play.

“So you gotta figure out another way to run the ball or throw the ball or just do different things because you can’t quit.

“So that’s what happened. We lost our quarterback and we still have to play the game.”

Bohen added: “There’s a lot of other people there and families and the whole world around it and the stadium and everybody has to go to work. So what are you gonna do? Well, you gotta figure it out. So that’s what we do. We found a way to figure it out.”

The second half of the fifth and final season of Yellowstone began on November 10.

*Spoilers follow – you have been warned*

At the start of the ninth episode of season five, titled “Desire Is All You Need”, Costner’s character John Dutton is found dead in the bathroom of the Montana governor’s mansion. It appears he suffered a gunshot wound to the head but it’s unclear how he sustained the fatal injury.

John’s son Jamie (Wes Bentley) – who is the Montana’s attorney general – then calls a press conference where he announces that his father died by suicide.

When asked the following day what he thought about his character’s death, Costner said: “I didn’t see it. I heard it’s a suicide, so that doesn’t make me want to rush to go see it.

“I’m going to be perfectly honest. I didn’t know it was actually airing last night. I didn’t realise yesterday was the thing.”

He continued: “Sometimes I’m like just a passenger in my life. There’s a lot going on. And somebody said, you know, it played last night? And I said, ‘Hmm, OK’. So no, I found out about it this morning actually.”

Costner said the writers are “pretty smart people” and expressed hope that the claims Dutton’s death was suicide could be “a red herring.”