Last week two solo exhibitions bearing voluminous — and timely — insight arrived at Los Angeles museums. Each is a mid-career survey of feminist painting, sculpture and video from the past 20 years, representing two very different artists for whom women’s place in the world is key.
“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” is a vibrant show of more than 80 paintings, drawings and mixed-media installations downtown at the Broad. Her work builds on a simple but trenchant observation: In the long history of Western painting, monumental portraits of Black women are almost nonexistent. Most of Thomas’ paintings pile on vivid color, brash patterning and lots of sparkling rhinestones, taking an exultant step toward rectifying the omission.
“Simone Leigh,” which is divided between the California African American Museum in Exposition Park and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Mid-Wilshire, features 27 sculptures and three projections. Sober history is essential to Leigh’s often elegant work, which gives equal weight to the two adjectives joined in the term “African American.” Women’s images are abundant, and multiple artistic traditions gracefully entwine.
The fact that both artists are Black adds to the timely relevance. During the Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack on Capitol Hill, a few Black faces were glimpsed amid the scandalously waved Confederate, Gadsden and “Appeal to Heaven” flags, but it is worth emphasizing that the number of those faces that belonged to women was roughly zero. Today, in a nation exhausted by dealing with the tenacity of systemic racism and riven with conflicts over straight white Christian male supremacy, Black women sometimes seem to be the linchpin barely holding things together.
Journalist Marianne Schnall, founder of the influential website feminist.com, once aptly noted that “Black women are by no means a monolith, and yet as a group have a deep understanding of the relational nature of freedom, precisely because they sit at various intersections of targeted oppression.” Add queer identity to the mix, and the comprehension deepens further.
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Simone Leigh, “Cupboard,” 2022; stoneware, raffia and steel armature
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
Thomas’ show was co-organized by Broad curator Ed Schad and Rachel Thomas of London’s Hayward Gallery, where it travels next year. (Stops are also planned for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France.) The Los Angeles debut opens with an elaborate stage set that replicates façades of tidy row houses in Camden, N.J., just across the river from Philly, where the artist was born in 1971. More than a mere conceit, the theatrical façades establish domestic settings as integral to Thomas’ aesthetic. On doorsteps, welcome mats are laid out.
Living rooms, rec rooms and finished basements turn up as installation formats throughout the show, while the compositions in her monumental portraits tightly collage figure and ground. The self-portrait in “Afro Goddess Looking Forward” is typical: Black-and-white photographs of Thomas’ eyes, some tabletop greenery and a portion of her torso mix with abundant painted features. The entirety of the figure is part of a dynamic patchwork that incorporates furniture, pillows, wallpaper and other accoutrements of a homey interior. Thomas presents as a Gen X Matisse.
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Visually, there’s no separating the artist from her domestic environment, even in the imagination, so dazzlingly exuberant are the two fabrications. The strategy is repeatedly employed in paintings of friends, lovers and family, where figures merge with ground. The union comes across not as a limiting confinement but as a refuge — a contained space of at times boisterous play in which creative exploration unfolds.
Queer artists often regard the private home as a safe place for resourceful invention, given a public realm that puts forward scant models for living a life, not to mention offering abundant danger for doing so. Thomas is no exception. In one room lined with faux-wood paneling and cherry-red ottomans, she even shows herself in each painting twice, dressed in form-fitting animal-print tights and happily engaged in wrestling matches with herself. In another, an elaborate video montage of the brilliant and outspoken singer Eartha Kitt can be viewed from comfortably upholstered furniture in a convivial living room.
Then there’s her trademark use of craft-store rhinestones, which is multipurpose. Hair, body contours and facial features are often lined with the glittery paste, sometimes multicolored. The pictures’ flatly painted skin and two-dimensional patterning in textiles and wallpaper are set into shimmering visual motion. The paintings become performers, like entertainers on TV or the stage.
Forget Hobby Lobby. This sparkly craft-store aesthetic perform a vernacular consecration of the women she paints (and she paints only women). Rather than tacky, the rhinestones are beguiling. They make you smile.
Mickalene Thomas embeds her portraits of Black women in decoarative interiors
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
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Elsewhere, Thomas incorporates queer predecessors in paintings of abstract heads. A borrowed Andy Warhol “Flower” becomes an eyepatch, while topsy-turvy eyeballs, pushed to the margins of a face, recall Jasper Johns’ borrowing of similar elements from Picasso’s “Woman in a Straw Hat.” Thomas is identifying family.
Sometimes the pictorial setting is layered into the exhibition’s physical installation. One gallery filled with potted plastic plants features collage-style paintings of pin-up nudes from Jet magazine. Thomas has installed several of them on a wall dominated by a photo-enlargement of a pointedly empty closet. Jet cheesecake photos were surely made with male subscribers in mind, but she identifies lesbian desire as a vital element within the magazine’s audience. Black diversity is real.
Over at CAAM and LACMA, “Simone Leigh” is a traveling exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, where it was seen last year. Included are several sculptures shown in the American Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Leigh, now 56, represented the United States. As at the Broad, male figures are nowhere to be seen.
Leigh has said that her work represents a “creolization” of art, mixing prominent European and Black traditions. Some of what is implied by the term is evident in the remarkable “Martinique.”
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Simone Leigh, “Martinique,” 2022; stoneware
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
Five feet tall, the cobalt blue stoneware figure of a lifesize headless women in a voluminous, bell-shaped skirt shows her cupping aggressive, bullet-like breasts in her hands. Titled for the island of Martinique, a former French colony in the Caribbean that legend held was once occupied solely by women, Leigh’s 2022 sculpture derives from a mid-19th century monument in the capitol, toppled during Black Lives Matter protests two years earlier.
The destroyed monument was a marble figure by French Salon artist Gabriel Vital Dubray that celebrated Martinique native Joséphine Bonaparte, first wife of Emperor Napoleon, who was instrumental in reviving slavery on the island despite its abolition in France. Dubray’s mediocre statue had already been beheaded three decades ago — a symbolic decapitation that couldn’t help but recall Marie-Antoinette’s actual fate at the guillotine. The sculpture stood headless in a public park until July 2020.
Think of Leigh’s subsequent sculpture as a monument to its headless-ness — at once a mockery of Joséphine’s thoughtless ignorance and a captivating salutation to the actual power of symbolic resistance. The volumetric, jug-like form of “Martinique” emphasizes clay’s eternal role as a vessel, which the artist fills with new meanings by virtue of her chosen forms and referents.
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Clay is the medium most often encountered in Leigh’s art, whether in glazed form or as the raw material for works then cast in bronze. Shiny stoneware sphinxes in modulated natural hues, an 11-foot mound of raffia crowned by the feminine symbol of a cowrie shell, a suspended cluster of several dozen breast-shaped terracotta gourds with golden nipples and pierced by metal antennas — sculpture’s most ancient substance is typically made sleek and modern in her hands.
Mickalene Thomas installed pin-up paintings on a photo blow-up of an empty closet
(Joshua White)
Much of the work is a hybrid of female and architectonic forms — literally, woman as shelter.
“Herm” remakes an ancient Greek boundary marker or signpost, historically composed of a squared stone pillar with a carved male head on top. Leigh’s version employs a cruciform bust of a woman instead. A simple vertical slit is in front where a Greek phallus would protrude, and a shapely striding leg extends from the rear, together feminizing the bronze. Her signpost sculpture stands more than eight feet tall. Amazonian in scale, it insists that a viewer look up to the boundary it marks.
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A bronze “Sentinel,” its surface featuring a rich black patina, transforms a traditional sphinx motif. A horizontal, corrugated body (think of the shape as a sheltering Quonset hut or nourishing grain shed) is topped at one end by a female head, its Afro hairstyle smoothed into a turban form. Incongruously, this watchful guardian’s face has no eyes, a motif common to all but one sculpture in the exhibition. The internalized, inward-looking result merges with a blank screen, onto which viewers project their own perceptions. Leigh’s best work generates a sense of intimate connection, even when its size approaches monumental.
One moving work is a wall-size, single-channel video projection of a recumbent Black torso, seen from behind, the head obscured beneath a stony pile of gray rubble. Made in tandem with Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh — when they work together, the duo goes by the name Girl — it turns the European tradition of a reclining female nude inside-out, making the gender ambiguous and burying the figure’s gaze. (A wistful musical soundtrack, all wind instruments and drums, was composed by Kaoru Watanabe.) Look closely, and the mountainous image, seemingly static, is gently breathing. Whether the barely rising and falling ribcage represents restorative sleep or a dying breath is hard to say.
In both parts of the show, a bothersome hunt is required of visitors to find object labels too discreetly printed in black typeface against dark brown walls (a phone flashlight comes in handy). The only real downside, though, is the bifurcation between two venues located across town from each other. The split diminishes the retrospective punch.
The more satisfying presentation is at CAAM, where the 13 works span two decades, allowing for some sense of artistic evolution and reverberation. At LACMA, all but four of the 17 pieces date from just the past two years; the installation is lovely, but it’s more like a contemporary gallery show than a museum survey.
Simone Leigh, “Sentinel,” 2019; bronze
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
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The prominence of the exhibitions by Thomas and Leigh — highly accomplished, queer Black women — is crucial, however, especially as June’s Pride celebrations commence. At least 515 anti-LGBTQ bills, a record number, are pending in state legislatures across the country, representing an unspeakable mass of public hate. Misogyny, a core driver of homophobia, is deeply embedded in American life.
It has been since at least 1692. That was the year Bridget Bishop was ascertained to be a witch by frightened, conformist Puritan religious elders in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Bishop, a thrice-married mother of four, was hauled away and lynched on Gallows Hill in Salem Village after a bizarre eight-day trial.
Three centuries later, as a criminally convicted former U.S. president bellows “witch hunt” into every available microphone, the madness endures, the cruelty continues. When Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and his cohort stripped women of bodily autonomy in overturning long-settled abortion rights two years ago, the conservative Catholic jurist resurrected the discredited opinions of British judge Matthew Hale for support. Hale, a Puritan sympathizer and later Lord Chief Justice of England, sent two women to their doom as “witches” after a trial in 1664.
Alito’s absurd citation of a notorious misogynist was widely greeted with a mix of disgust and ridicule, but not surprise. (Even though a nearly two-thirds majority of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, we live in a country where rule by a political minority is the norm.) Thomas and Leigh, judging from their generous and eloquent paintings, sculptures and videos, are unlikely to have been shocked. Saddened, for sure, and no doubt even scandalized — but not shocked.
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More’s the pity. And more’s the reason for their bracing art.
Girl (Simone Leigh and Chitra Ganesh), “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell. . . ,” 2011; single-channel video, color, sound, 7:14 min.
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
Mickalene Thomas and Simone Leigh
Mickalene Thomas Through Sept. 29 (closed Mondays) at the Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., L.A. (213) 232-6200, www.thebroad.org
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Simone Leigh Through Jan. 20 (closed Mondays) at the California African American Museum, Exposition Park, 600 State Drive, L.A., (213) 744-7432, www.caamuseum.org; and also the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org
In the summer of 1991, Nirvana filmed the music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a Culver City sound stage. Kurt Cobain strummed the grunge anthem’s iconic four-chord opening riff on a 1969 Fender Mustang, Lake Placid Blue with a signature racing stripe.
Nearly 35 years later, the six-string relic hung on a gallery wall at Christie’s in Beverly Hills as part of a display of late billionaire businessman Jim Irsay’s world-renowned guitar collection, which heads to auction at Christie’s, New York, beginning Tuesday. Each piece in the Beverly Hills gallery, illuminated by an arched spotlight and flanked by a label chronicling its history, carried the aura of a Renaissance painting.
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Irsay’s billion-dollar guitar arsenal, crowned “The Greatest Guitar Collection on Earth” by Guitar World magazine, is the focal point of the Christie’s auction, which has split approximately 400 objects — about half of which are guitars — into four segments: the “Hall of Fame” group of anchor items, the “Icons of Pop Culture” class of miscellaneous memorabilia, the “Icons of Music” mixed batch of electric and acoustic guitars and an online segment that compiles the remainder of Irsay’s collection. The online sale, featuring various autographed items, smaller instruments and historical documents, features the items at the lowest price points.
A portion of auction proceeds will be donated to charities that Irsay supported during his lifetime.
The instruments of famous musicians have long been coveted collector’s items. But in the case of the Jim Irsay Collection, the handcrafted six-strings have acquired a more ephemeral quality in the eyes of their admirers.
Amelia Walker, the specialist head of private and iconic collections at Christie’s, said at the recent highlight exhibition in L.A. that the auction represents “a real moment where these [objects] are being elevated beyond what we traditionally call memorabilia” into artistic masterpieces.
“They deserve the kind of the pedestal that we give to art as well,” Walker said. “Because they are not only works of art in terms of their creation, but what they have created, what their owners have created with them — it’s the purest form of art.”
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Cobain’s Fender was only one of the music history treasures nestled in Christie’s gallery. A few paces away, Jerry Garcia’s “Budman” amplifier, once part of the Grateful Dead’s three-story high “Wall of Sound,” perched atop a podium. Just past it lay the Beatles logo drum head (estimated between $1 million and $2 million) used for the band’s debut appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which garnered a historic 73 million viewers and catalyzed the British Invasion. Pencil lines were still visible beneath the logo’s signature “drop T.”
Pencil lines are still visible on the drum head Ringo Starr played during the Beatles’ debut appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
(Christie’s Images LTD, 2026)
It is exceptionally rare for even one such artifact to go to market, let alone a billion-dollar group of them at once, Walker said. But a public sale enabling many to participate and demonstrate the “true market value” of these objects is what Irsay would have wanted, she added.
Dropping tens of millions of dollars on pop culture memorabilia may seem an odd hobby for an NFL general manager, yet Irsay viewed collecting much like he viewed leading the Indianapolis Colts.
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Irsay, the youngest NFL general manager in history, said in a 2014 Colts Media interview that watching and emulating the legendary NFL owners who came before him “really taught me to be a steward.”
“Ownership is a great responsibility. You can’t buy respect,” he said. “Respect only comes from you being a steward.”
The first major acquisition in Irsay’s collection came in 2001, with his $2.4-million purchase of the original 120-foot scroll for Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, “On the Road.” He loved the book and wanted to preserve it, Walker said. But he also frequently lent it out, just like he regularly toured his guitar collection beginning 20 years later.
Jim Irsay purchased the original 120-foot scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” for $2.4 million in 2001.
(Christie’s Images)
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“He said publicly, ‘I’m not the owner of these things. I’m just that current custodian looking after them for future generations,’ ” Walker said. “And I think that’s what true collectors always say.”
At its L.A. highlight exhibition, Irsay’s collection held an air of synchronicity. Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics for “Hey Jude” hung just a few steps from a promotional poster — the only one in existence — for the 1959 concert Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were en route to perform when their plane crashed. The tragedy spurred Don McLean to write “American Pie,” about “the day the music died.”
Later, the Beatles’ 1966 song “Paperback Writer” played over the speakers near-parallel to the guitars the song was written on.
Irsay’s collection also contains a bit of whimsy, with gems like a prop golden ticket from 1971’s “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” — estimated between $60,000 and $120,000 — and reading, “In your wildest dreams you could not imagine the marvelous surprises that await you!”
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Another fan-favorite is the “Wilson” volleyball from 2000’s “Cast Away,” starring Tom Hanks, estimated between $60,000 and $80,000, Gibson said.
Historically, such objects were often preserved by accident. But as the memorabilia market has ballooned over the last decade or so, Gibson said, “a lot of artists are much more careful about making sure that things don’t get into the wrong hands. After rehearsals, they tidy up after themselves.”
If anything proves the market value of seemingly worthless ephemera, Walker added, it’s fans clawing for printed set lists at the end of a concert.
“They’re desperate for that connection. This is what it’s all about,” the specialist said. It’s what drove Irsay as well, she said: “He wanted to have a connection with these great artists of his generation and also the generation above him. And he wanted to share them with people.”
In Irsay’s home, his favorite guitars weren’t hung like classic paintings. Instead, they were strewn about the rooms he frequented, available for him to play whenever the urge struck him.
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Thanks to tune-up efforts from Walker, many of the guitars headed to auction are fully operational in the hopes that their buyers can do the same.
“They’re working instruments. They need to be looked after, to be played,” Walker said. And even though they make for great gallery art, “they’re not just for hanging on the wall.”
“Trying to find your niche as a movie star isn’t easy,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. Take Glen Powell. A year ago, the Twisters and Anyone but You star was being talked about as possibly the next Tom Cruise. But he “stumbled badly” when he tried to play a macho action hero in November’s remake of The Running Man, and he’s now turned in a second straight box office flop. He took a risk with How to Make a Killing, playing a guy cheated by fate who we’re supposed to root for as he begins murdering off the seven rich relatives standing between him and an enormous inheritance. But c’mon. “Powell is charming, but he’s not that charming.”
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The movie “needed to pick a side,” said Jacob Oller in AV Club. It could have been “a clownish class comedy” or “bitter sociopathic satire,” but it winds up being neither, and “at the center of it all is Powell, making the same face for an hour and 45 minutes, too unflappable to root for, too smug to magnetize as an inhuman American Psycho.” I’m not ready to give up on him, said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. To me, he and co-star Margaret Qualley, who plays the femme fatale who eggs on the killing spree, come across as “such alluringly nasty delights” that this reworking of the 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets “ survives its potentially lethal missteps and works on its own limited terms.” Though its teeth aren’t as sharp as they should be, “it’s smart and spiky enough to leave a pleasurably painful mark.”
‘Pillion’
Directed by Harry Lighton (Not rated)
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★★★★
While this gay BDSM rom-com from a rookie director “might sound niche,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, “free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.” Former Harry Potter side figure Harry Melling stars as a shy singleton who’s figuring out what he wants in a relationship when he happens into a submissive-dominant entanglement with a tall, handsome biker played by Alexander Skarsgard. Soon, Melling’s Colin is obeying his lover’s every order, including by shaving himself bald and sleeping like a dog on the floor. But the “kinky-funny” screenplay, which won a prize at Cannes, makes sure we see that Colin is not stuck but growing.
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While the movie’s sex scenes are “refreshingly graphic,” they’re “never used or shock value,” said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. “The real shock comes from how emotionally involved the characters become within the construct of their kink.” And when Colin brings his new lover home to meet the parents, Skarsgard and Lesley Sharp, as Colin’s suburban London mom, do memorable work because “neither of them approaches the scene in a way you’d expect.” Until the ending, which “feels a little neat,” said Zachary Barnes in The Wall Street Journal, the movie “proceeds with an assurance of tone that’s especially impressive for a first-time filmmaker handling material like this.” Harry Lighton’s debut “could have been simply shocking, revving its engine in sexed-up style. Instead, Pillion purrs.”
‘Midwinter Break’
Directed by Polly Findlay (PG-13)
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★★
Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds “would be appealing to watch just fumbling for their reading glasses,” said Natalia Winkelman in The New York Times. Unfortunately, this “staid” drama about an aging Irish couple puts that claim to the test. A “slow-moving film with a sappy score and mellow mood,” Midwinter Break opens with Manville’s Stella surprising Hinds’ Gerry by arranging a spur-of-the-moment trip to Amsterdam. Alas, “precious little conflict occurs until long afterward.”
But while Polly Findlay’s adaptation of a Bernard MacLaverty novel is a “delicate” film, said Lindsey Bahr in the Associated Press, its impact can be profound “if you can get on its level.” Stella, a devout Catholic, has an ulterior motive for dragging Gerry abroad, and when she nervously proposes how she’d like to live more purposefully in retirement, “it feels earth-shattering.” This is a couple accustomed to leaving much unsaid, including how the violence of the Troubles led them to flee Belfast years earlier for Scotland. Manville and Hinds give the movie everything they’ve got, said Caryn James in The Hollywood Reporter. In a scene in which Stella pours out her heart to a stranger, “Manville delivers one of her most magnificent performances, which is saying a lot.” Alas, the script lets them down, “not because it needs more action but because this ordinary couple’s problems seem so unsurprising, their inner lives so veiled.”
This story contains spoilers for the pilot of “Marshals.”
When the curtain came down on “Yellowstone” last year, Kayce Dutton had finally found his happily-ever-after.
The youngest son of wealthy rancher John Dutton (Kevin Costner) had secured a modest cabin in a mountainous region where he could reside in secluded peace with his beloved wife, Monica (Kelsey Asbille), and son, Tate (Brecken Merrill), far from the turbulent dysfunction of his family.
“Kayce found his little peace of heaven, getting everything he ever wanted and fought for,” said Luke Grimes, who plays the soft-spoken Dutton in “Yellowstone.”
Grimes reprises the role in CBS’ “Marshals,” which premiered Sunday. But in the new series, Kayce’s serenity has been brutally shattered, forcing him to find a new path forward after an unimaginable tragedy.
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The drama is the first of several planned spinoffs of “Yellowstone,” which became TV’s hottest scripted series during its five-season run. And while some familiar faces return and events unfold against the magnificent backdrop of towering mountains and lush greenery, “Marshals” is definitely not “Yellowstone” 2.0.
Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton in “Marshals,” which combines the gritty Western flavor of “Yellowstone” with the procedural genre.
(Sonja Flemming / CBS )
In “Marshals,” Kayce joins an elite squad of U.S. Marshals headed by his Navy SEAL teammate Pete Calvin (Logan Marshall-Green). The drama combines two distinct brands — the gritty Western flavor of “Yellowstone” with the procedural genre, a flagship of CBS’ prime-time slate.
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During an interview at an exclusive club in downtown Los Angeles, Grimes expressed excitement about dusting off his cowboy hat and boots, though he admitted to having initial concerns about whether the project was a fit.
“I had never watched a procedural before, so I had to do some homework on what that was,” Grimes said hours before the gala premiere of “Marshals” at the Autry Museum of the American West in Griffith Park. “And I just couldn’t wrap my head around it at first. In the finale, Kayce had ridden off into the sunset. So I thought, ‘Let him be, let him go.’ ”
Those doubts eventually ebbed away.
“To be honest, there was a part of me that didn’t want to let Kayce go just yet,” Grimes said. “Saying goodbye to him was really hard, so the opportunity to keep this going was something I couldn’t pass up. We get to show his backstory and also this other side of him that we didn’t see in ‘Yellowstone.’ ”
But this Kayce is a man in crisis. “Yellowstone” devotees will likely be shocked by the “elephant in the room” — the revelation in the pilot episode that Monica has died of cancer. The couple’s sexy and loving chemistry was a key element in the series while also establishing Grimes as a heartthrob.
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“I think fans will be upset — and they should be,” Grimes said as he looked downward. “Kayce is very upset. It’s the worst thing that could have happened to him. But as much as I’m really upset not to work with Kelsey, it’s a good idea for the show.”
He added, “His dream life is no longer available to him. Now the only thing he has is his son, who is not so sure he wants the same life as Kayce. A big part of the season is Kayce learning how to manage all these new things — new job, being a single father.”
“His dream life is no longer available to him. Now the only thing he has is his son, who is not so sure he wants the same life as Kayce,” said Luke Grimes about his character Kayce.
(Jay L. Clendenin / For The Times)
Executive producer and showrunner Spencer Hudnut (CBS’ “SEAL Team”) acknowledged in a separate interview that viewers may be stunned by the tragedy. “Real life intervenes for Kayce. Unfortunately it happens to so many of us.”
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But he stressed that although Monica is physically gone, her presence will be heavily felt this season.
“She is guiding Kayce, and their relationship is moving forward,” Hudnut said. “His dealing with his inability to confront his grief is a big part of the season. It became clear that something horrible had to happen to put Kayce on a different path.”
As the development evolved, Grimes embraced the procedural concept: “This is a very different show and structure. This is an action show, very fast paced. I meet a lot of fans who say they really want to see Kayce go full Navy SEAL.”
Alumni from “Yellowstone” returning in “Marshals” include Gil Birmingham as tribal Chairman Thomas Rainwater and Mo Brings Plenty as his confidante Mo.
“Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan, who had already spearheaded the prequels “1883” and “1923,” will further expand the “Yellowstone” universe later this month with “The Madison,” starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell, about a New York City family living in Montana’s Madison River territory. Later this year, Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser will star in “Dutton Ranch,” reprising their respective “Yellowstone” roles as John Dutton’s volcanic daughter Beth Dutton and her husband, boss ranch hand Rip Wheeler.
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Hudnut said fans of “Yellowstone” will recognize themes that were central to that series: “The cost and consequences of violence, man versus nature, man versus man.”
“We’re trying to tap into what people loved about ‘Yellowstone’ but to tell the story in a different framework,” he said. “The procedural brand is obviously very successful for CBS. And nothing has been bigger than ‘Yellowstone.’ So the challenge is, how do you marry those things?”
Taking on the lead role prompted Grimes to reflect on how “Yellowstone” transformed his life after co-starring roles in films like “American Sniper” and “Fifty Shades of Grey” and playing a vampire in the TV series “True Blood.”
“‘Yellowstone’ changed my life in many, many ways,” he said. “The biggest change is that I now live where we shot the show in Montana. The first time I went there, I would have never thought I would ever live there.
“I would come back to the city after shooting. But a little bit more each year, I felt more out of place here, and more peace and at home there. I’m a big nature person — I never was a big city person, but I had to be here to do what I wanted. But after the third season, my wife and I decided to move there. We wanted to start a family.”
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The topic of a Kayce spinoff kept coming up during the filming of the finale, but “meanwhile we were having a baby, so that was the biggest thing on my plate.”
“‘Yellowstone’ changed my life in many, many ways,” said Luke Grimes.
(Jay L. Clendenin/For The Times)
Grimes was also dealing with the off-screen drama that impacted production due to logistical and creative differences between Costner and Sheridan. Costner, who was the show’s biggest attraction, exited after filming the first part of the final season. His character was killed off.
Asked about the backstage tension, Grimes said, “I just tried to do my job to the best of my ability, and not get caught up in all that. It was sort of frustrating, but I felt lucky to have a job.”
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He recalled getting a call from Sheridan about the plans for a spinoff: “He said, ‘I think you should talk to the guy who is going to be the showrunner. I’m not telling you to do it, and I’m not telling you not to do it. But Spencer is great and he has some good ideas.’ ”
Hudnut said Kayce “was always my favorite character. Also, Luke is not Kayce. Kayce is an amazing character, but Luke is really thoughtful and smart. He is a true artist and has an artist’s soul, while Kayce is kicking down doors and terrorizing people. And Luke has such a great presence. He can do so much with just a look to the camera. He is a true leading man.”
In addition to starring in “Marshals,” Grimes is also an executive producer. He pitched the opening sequence — a flashback showing Kayce in the battlefield. He also performs the song that plays over the final scene, in which he visits his wife’s grave. The ballad is from Grimes’ self-titled country album which was released last year.
“Luke’s creative fingerprints are all over the pilot,” Hudnut said.
Grimes said he does not feel pressure about being the first follow-up from “Yellowstone” to premiere.
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“We’re not trying to make the same show, so no matter what happens, its a win-win,” he said. “I had a blast doing it.”
