Director Christina Voros dives into the highly anticipated return of the hit Paramount Network series to reveal how they kept John Dutton’s fate a secret (there were code words), how it propels everything forward and how the cast “shouldered the weight of [Costner’s] absence in such a bold and beautiful way.”

[This story contains major spoilers from the Yellowstone season 5B premiere.]

Yellowstone returned with a big swing on Sunday night by giving viewers the answer they were hoping to get right out of the gate. How would the hit Western saga handle the exit of star Kevin Costner and the fate of his revered show patriarch John Dutton?

Taylor Sheridan, the writer and mastermind of the Yellowstone-verse, did something rather unexpected when he quickly revealed during the season 5B premiere — and return of TV’s No. 1 show — that John Dutton has indeed died. That fate was likely expected, given Costner’s high-profile and abrupt exit from the Paramount Network series between the first and second half of season five. But the fact that it was revealed so quickly was a surprise.

Here’s how it played out: Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and brother Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) arrive at John’s Governor’s mansion, which is swarming with police, and eventually see for themselves that their larger-than-life father has taken his own life. Costner is never shown — viewers see a limp body laying next to a gun — but the look on his children’s faces says it all. They oscillate between guttural grief and blinding vengeance, before the show then flashes back to six weeks earlier and catches up with the majority of the ensemble. That includes Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), the fixer girlfriend of estranged Dutton brother Jamie (Wes Bentley), who is revealed to have put the hit out on John following the explosive midseason finale; she instructs her murderer-for-hire to make John’s death appear to be a suicide. The episode ends with Beth vowing once again to kill Jamie, before she lets out an animalistic scream when reunited with her husband Rip (Cole Hauser), who has returned to the ranch following the news of John’s death. (By the episode’s end, Costner is never shown; he reacted to what he heard about the episode on Monday.)

When speaking to executive producer Christina Voros, who directed the hour, it takes her a few attempts during our conversation below to adjust to being able to speak out loud, to someone outside the Yellowstone fold, about John Dutton’s fate.

In our previous conversation, she had detailed the top-secret protocols put in place in order to keep every twist and turn of these six episodes a surprise for fans until they air (weekly, Sundays at 8 p.m. on Paramount Network, followed by an encore at 10 p.m. on CBS). Voros, who helmed four of these six episodes, is among a small group who knows how everything plays out. She redacted scripts for the cast (only the main cast knows the ending); they filmed alternate scenes and used code words in scripts.

“It’s so weird to talk about it all, because it has been so clandestine for so long,” she now tells The Hollywood Reporter, revealing the codes for the John Dutton death scene. “We didn’t talk about it as a death. Any time there is a death or some sort of event, we called it an ‘arrival.’ And we gave John’s character a pseudonym. We called him ‘Crosby.’ We were calling the opening scene, ‘Beth discovers that Crosby has arrived.’ It was on call sheets and the crew were like, ‘Who is Crosby? And, where’s he coming from?’ I did some random research: [John Schuyler] Crosby was the last governor of Montana before Montana was turned into a state, in the 1880s. It was a very random, obscure, esoteric reference [by Taylor Sheridan].”

As Voros settles in to unpack this first episode — which may or may not usher in the end of Yellowstone (a sixth season has been in talks since season 5B was first announced to be the end of the flagship series) — she applauds Sheridan for how he handled the fate of Costner’s character after the behind-the-scenes saga around his role made headlines during the nearly two years the series has been off the air. (Costner eventually confirmed his exit, over a scheduling dispute around his film saga Horizon, though he remains a credited executive producer; but his onscreen involvement has never been made clear, given that he was alive when viewers last saw him on the series.)

“I think Taylor’s decision to begin this way was incredibly brave,” says Voros. “I think it is testament to his faith in the characters and the actors who embody them to go, ‘Let’s not make this about the incident. Let’s make this about how these human beings exist in the aftermath.’ That was more interesting to [Taylor] than the incident itself.”

She continues, “Death and birth are the two constants in our human experience. They are the most pivotal moments in our lives, and yet they are the most pedestrian elements of being a human being. What’s interesting about birth and death is not the birth and death itself, but the way it affects us as people. To me, I think that was the driving force in telling the story this way. He’s asked, ‘How does everybody else survive and what do they do?’ And that’s where the mystery is. That is where the unraveling is. That is where the story is.”

Read on below to see what else Voros says about the shocking yet contemplative premiere (which was the show’s biggest-ever first-night audience), how John’s death propels the story forward and how the cast stepped up to shoulder the show’s legacy — whether these episodes are really the end, or not.

Now that the season 5B premiere is out, I can see what Taylor Sheridan has been saying all along — this is where he was going with the story, things just got accelerated by Kevin Costner’s exit. So going back, you have this fate you are going to hand John Dutton, but you don’t have Costner so you can’t show him. Can you talk about the decision to open with the death, and then peel back to tell the story in flashbacks?

I can’t talk to the decision: It’s Taylor’s world. He made the bold decision. It’s a tricky question, because I don’t want to foreshadow anything that’s coming. Because it has to do with the writing. It has to do with Taylor’s choice to not only deal with this episode, but the entire season. I have a lot to say about it, but there’s nothing interesting to say without talking to the greater choice as a whole of how the season is going to develop, and I don’t want to tip our hats to any of that yet.

The episode opens in the present, and then flashes back to six weeks before, which is around where the midseason finale left off. Then the final scene returns viewers to the present timeline with the scene between Jamie Dutton (Bentley) and Sarah (Olivieri) after John’s death. Will the season continue to tell the story in the flashback timeline?

Taylor has always used flashbacks very powerfully in the show. He has always used flashbacks to give a deeper, more layered complexity to the narrative. Some people use flashbacks for exposition and Taylor doesn’t do that. He uses them to complicate things, not to explain them. And I think this season is an excellent example of the way he has used flashbacks as a storytelling device in Yellowstone from the beginning. It’s actually a very organic way to move into this final chapter, because he has always used flashbacks as a way to bring the audience into the complexity of the storytelling so there’s something really interesting in the way we are bouncing back from past and present this season that makes the journey a lot more interesting and deeper.

Kelly Reilly and Beth Dutton with Kevin Costner as John Dutton in the first half of season five. Courtesy of Paramount+

Opening with Beth Dutton (Reilly) racing her car up to her father’s Governor’s mansion sets the tone at an all-time high intensity. She knows something bad happened even before she knows what happened. So, clearly, a lot unfolds in these six weeks that we will find out about. When we last saw Beth and John (Costner), they were sitting together confidently plotting Jamie’s demise. Can you talk about filming Beth’s gutted reaction to John’s death, and also seeing her and Kayce (Grimes) lean on each other in a way the show hasn’t explored in some time?

This season was a masterclass in working with actors at the top of their game. It was tremendously rewarding to see these characters who have been integral to the story from the beginning share the weight of the absence of the patriarch. Everyone has grown into themselves and their characters in such a deep and profound way. It’s sort of art imitating life imitating art. In the absence of John, the family has to come together to shoulder the weight of the world, much in the same way as the cast has come together to shoulder the weight of his absence in such a bold and beautiful way.

You are seeing the purest form of Beth, the purest form of Rip, the strongest and the weakest versions of themselves as they grapple with this new reality. The stakes were so high for the characters and for the actors, that watching everyone grow into that place was a really beautiful thing. Working with Kelly is one of the great joys of my professional career. She is one of the most hardworking, thoughtful, soulful artists that I’ve ever had an opportunity to work with, and this season requires of all the cast a really nuanced and profound depth of feeling without the giant explosive set pieces. This is a meditation on loss and what it brings out in people, which is the best and the worst in them, and the strongest and the weakest of them. And getting to navigate those scenes with actors who have been navigating peaks and valleys the entire history of the show is really the crown jewel of their performances, to see them shouldering the weight of the legacy of the show themselves.

As director, can you talk about the decision around how you showed John Dutton’s body in the death scene? In TV when we don’t see a face, we wonder if the person is really dead. But this is clearly a different scenario.

It’s not even a choice as a director, it was very much in the DNA of the writing that episode. The scenes that are in the present tense dealing with his death seem very intentionally about the characters that continue on and what their experience of his death is. So you know that it is him by virtue of the way that Beth and Kayce are reacting to it, and that’s what matters. There was a very intentional perspective, and it relates to the flashbacks as well, because there’s the juxtaposition of when everything was kind of idyllic and OK and tricky but also promising, juxtaposed against the stark reality of this loss. So it was present in the writing, but it was more important to me to focus on how you learn more about the death by looking at the lines on Luke’s face and the tears in Kelly’s eyes than you do by looking at a body absent of life on the ground.

Wes Bentley as Jamie Dutton (center) announcing to the world that his father John Dutton, the Governor of Montana, has died, in the season 5B premiere. Courtesy of Paramount

It’s wild to see that Jamie got his dad in the end — really, the credit goes to Sarah. But John has always seemed invincible, and that’s an air that John himself walked around with. In the final scene of this episode when Jamie questions Sarah for actually going through with their hit on John, telling her they only talked about it once, is he really that naïve? What should we take away from Jamie in that scene?

On the heels of season 5A, the plot is set. The [murder-for-hire] plot is discussed. But then in the action of Jamie’s call for impeachment and the professional angle with which he is coming at John, I think there leaves room for one to imagine that Jamie’s own sense of guilt for doing that could confuse the reality, especially because it is so inconceivable for John to be dead. Much as you said, it’s not something John would have considered; it’s not something any of his children could really ever wrap their heads around. So in the moment that it happens, the shock and denial and guilt all tangle up together.

I think it’s a case of how sometimes we know something deep down but we refuse it. To acknowledge it is to acknowledge a complicity and to judge ourselves in a way that we resist inherently, it’s almost a psychotic break. And I think Jamie’s own sense of reality is swirling because of the stakes around all of it. He is one of the smartest, if not the smartest character, on the show. So to imply that it never crossed his mind doesn’t seem valid. To imply that in the chaos of coming to terms with this thing that has always seemed impossible, that for a moment, one could lose the thread. And I think that was the idea behind it.

Is Sarah the real villain? Will it be Sarah v. Beth in the end?

Sarah is one of the people who is probably smarter than Jamie. The way that Dawn Olivieri has embodied that character is absolutely brilliant, because she is a shapeshifter. You don’t know which version of her is real. If you think of the first time we meet her, she’s watching this press conference going, “I’m gonna go after the son.” She is a political machine and it’s hard for us to know what to trust as an audience; it’s hard for Jamie to know what to trust. And it would take an adversary that smart and that ephemeral to be able to disorient Jamie enough to trust her. In a world where he has no one left, it takes a very specific kind of character to allow him to be enamored. Dawn has done a wonderful job of making Sarah both dangerous and almost a sorceress in the way she manipulates the situation to her advantage.

I spoke to the main cast about how John’s death propels these episodes. I also covered Succession and the shock of Brian Cox’s patriarch, Logan Roy, dying propelled that final season as well: The king is dead, what now? Now that you can elaborate with me a little more, do you think Taylor Sheridan did the character of John Dutton justice the best he could, since everything is now to avenge what happened to him?

I read that first script and I had the breath knocked out of me. I didn’t see it coming. I think there are people who are anticipating the season and wondering if it could all be about solving the mystery, right? But if you lay it out straight out of the gate, then the mystery becomes: What is the rest of the show going to be, since we’ve already let the cat out of the bag, and I think it’s kind of ingenious. I think everyone going into the season, everyone who loves the show, has ideas about what the ending is going to be. And I think Taylor has found a way — and we mentioned this the last time — where good drama is surprising and inevitable. It makes sense that things end where they end up, but you don’t necessarily see it coming and you don’t necessarily understand the road you are going to take to get there.

Some of the beauty of the use of flashbacks is that it’s really juxtaposing and bringing into high relief how much is at stake — how much has been lost, how much was taken for granted, how much we all thought John would go on forever. It is shocking. And so I think rather than stringing people along to get to a place everyone sees coming, the decision to just open with it is really brave and really interesting.

I read the first episode and I went, “What happens next?” I had no idea. There are different versions of storytelling where you could have dragged it out to the end, as opposed to ripping the bandaid off. Now it becomes: What is the story? What do they do? How do they do it? Who survives? How do they figure it out with the patriarch and their North star, who has ultimately been the general and who everyone has fallen in line behind?

Beth’s animalistic cry ended this episode. Beth and Rip were the pulsating heart and concluding it with Rip returning to the ranch made me feel like — now the war really begins. Can you talk about reuniting these two and that sob from Beth; how many times did you film that scene?

I think we maybe shot it twice. We waited until the light was a very specific level of purple. We had five cameras. I didn’t want to shoot it more than twice; I don’t think they wanted to do it more than twice. It was so visceral. Everyone at video village was so breathless after that take. My dog was on set with me and heard the sound that Kelly made during the rehearsal and ran out to her. You felt the bottom of her soul in that moment. There have been a lot of powerful moments making this show over the years, but I will carry that one with me forever.

Is there anything you can tease about what comes next week?

I think there’s a lot to unravel. There is a map that has to be drawn as to how to move forward, and I think the next episode begins to outline the way that map is drawn.

Yellowstone releases new episodes in its six-episode season 5B on Sundays at 8 p.m. on Paramount Network, followed by a linear premiere on CBS at 10 p.m. Head here for how to stream Yellowstone and read THR‘s premiere chat with Luke Grimes and Kelsey Asbille.