Kevin Costner’s 8-Part Series Is the Most Unsettling Western the ‘Yellowstone’ Star Has Ever Made
Ever since seeing How the West Was Won at the age of 7, Kevin Costner fell in love with the Western genre, a passion that he has always been vocal about. His first film as a director, 1990’s Dances With Wolves, is a Western, and a wildly successful one at that, landing the Best Picture Oscar, the first Western to win in the category since 1931’s Cimarron, and six other Oscars. Over the years, he’s appeared in several Westerns, which have largely brought out the best in Costner.
Ever since seeing How the West Was Won at the age of 7, Kevin Costner fell in love with the Western genre, a passion that he has always been vocal about. His first film as a director, 1990’s Dances With Wolves, is a Western, and a wildly successful one at that, landing the Best Picture Oscar, the first Western to win in the category since 1931’s Cimarron, and six other Oscars. Over the years, he’s appeared in several Westerns, which have largely brought out the best in Costner.
What he found was that living in the West was far more difficult than the idea of the plucky pioneer and his family setting up shop in the untamed West. Many people were forced to live there without the tools or talents to be able to do so effectively. “They went in groups, and they sometimes perished as groups, and their humanity was alive,” Costner explains, “And their worst tendencies came out, and their best tendencies came out.” But he also tells the story of those who had what it took, pointing to a man named John Colter as a perfect example. As Costner tells it, Colter was a mountain man, perfectly fit for being out there [the West], hunting and creating some of the “greatest, wildest stories ever.”
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That love for the Western has never been more prominent than now, with his role as John Dutton in Yellowstone and his passion project, Horizon: An American Saga, two recent examples of his work in the genre. Add to that list the eight-episode docuseries on the History Channel, Kevin Costner’s The West, which premiered on May 26, 2025. Costner hosts and narrates the series and serves as executive producer alongside historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s a look at the history of the American West, but if you’re looking for feel-good, cowboy-rides-off-into-the-sunset-with-his-gal stories, look elsewhere, which is something Costner discovered working on the project.
