Taylor Sheridan hates Trump but Paramount knows how valuable the show is to MAGAts. There’s less an element of playing both sides but of trying to tread carefully.
[quote] Sheridan insists that Yellowstone is not a “red-state show.” “They refer to it as ‘the conservative show’ or ‘the Republican show’ or ‘the red-state Game of Thrones,’ ” he told me. “And I just sit back laughing. I’m like, ‘Really?’ The show’s talking about the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the West, and land-grabbing. That’s a red-state show?”
[quote] Paramount’s business has an awful lot riding on the work of Taylor Sheridan. So the company appears understandably concerned about alienating his base. When Kevin Costner wore an I’m for Liz Cheney T-shirt during the apostate Republican’s doomed reelection fight, MAGA fans on Twitter called him a fake cowboy, a Hollywood elitist, and a hypocrite; a hostile column appeared in National Review. And when I asked Sheridan about something he’d said years ago about Donald Trump, it caused a disturbance in the Taylorverse.
[quote] I’d come across a Sheridan interview from 2017, when he was promoting Wind River, in which he’d said of then-President Trump: “Can we just impeach that motherfucker right now? Like what are we—I don’t understand … It’s just, it’s so embarrassing.” I was interested in how he thinks about politics in relation to his screenwriting, so I asked him about it. “I don’t recall that,” he said.
I noted that maybe he’d thought he was off-mic. “I had just wrapped a movie and I was in Cannes,” he said. (He wasn’t in Cannes.) “I was mad about everything. Twelve-hour press junkets with no food or water will do that to you.”
[quote]I dropped it, and we moved on. The next morning, a Sunday, agitated texts started coming in from the Paramount team. David Glasser, I was told, was upset. The publicists were upset. The higher-ups at Paramount were upset. Unless I promised to leave Sheridan’s Trump quote out of this story, I was told, a trip I’d scheduled to visit the Yellowstone set in Montana was at risk of being canceled. (Ultimately, I made the trip.)
quote] I’d also asked Sheridan about another political comment he’d made, to Esquire in 2018, in which he’d said that “white privilege” was a noxious concept that was off-putting to many Americans. “Here’s the worst two words put together in the past ten years: white privilege,” Sheridan had told the journalist Stephen Rodrick. “Oh, really? Help me, Mr. Harvard-fucking-Ph.D., convince the man who’s losing his ranch, who can’t afford his kid’s college—he has no health care, he has no fucking clue what Obamacare is, he’s never seen a social-security-fucking-office, his only concept of federal government is taxes. How do I convince that guy he’s privileged? You won’t do it.” In that answer, it seemed to me, lies the populist political sensibility that infuses much of Sheridan’s work.
[quote]This Sheridan was willing to discuss. What he’d meant with his white-privilege comment, Sheridan told me, was that “you should be mindful of not berating the subject you are trying to educate, and find a way for them to digest your point of view without turning them off to it.”
