Gil Birmingham Breaks Silence on Yellowstone Finale and What’s Next for Season 6
0 2 minutes read
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Yellowstone Season 5 finale, “Life Is a Promise.”]
Gil Birmingham knew that Thomas Rainwater would get the Yellowstone Dutton ranch since “Episode 1 of the first season,” he reveals to TV Insider. The actor says that Taylor Sheridan has always known that the land would end up back in the hands of the Native American people by the end of Yellowstone, and Birmingham was one of the very few who have known all along. He was “sworn to secrecy” about this storyline for the entirety of Yellowstone‘s filming, he told TV Insider, but knowing the end didn’t make it any less emotionally impactful when it came time to film it.
With rumors of another season still circulating, Birmingham shared his thoughts on the finale and where the series could go from here.
The hit Western Yellowstone wrapped up its fifth season this month, and while the finale seemingly brought the whole series to a close, the fact that it has been consistently billed as the “season finale” instead of the “series finale” has fed some fans’s hopes that the show might yet be picked up for an unexpected sixth season.
Though no official announcements have been made either way yet, that’s hardly stopped Dutton lovers from imagining where the series could go if it carried on into a new season—and they’re not the only ones.
Actor Gil Birmingham, who plays Broken Rock reservation leader Thomas Rainwater in the series, shared his thoughts on the finale and his own vision of where the series could pick up in season six now that the Dutton land has been returned to the tribe. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Birmingham said, “I’m happy with the ending, of course, for Thomas Rainwater and for the tribe.”
However, when asked about a possible direction for Rainwater and the tribe in season six, he later added, “I see a great opening. I don’t know how [show creator Taylor Sheridan] feels about it, but there are some tribes that have succeeded on a smaller scale.” He explained how tribes like the Chumash and Chickasaw have created centers for education about Native life and the natural world.
“There are those possibilities that I see [with Rainwater], and that’s what I would plan if the show continued and what my tribe would do with it,” he said. “I think more to the educational center and development so that people within the tribe could feel secure in their home, and that their original homes can’t be taken away.
There would still be an ongoing onslaught of private interests the same way that John Dutton experienced it. The corporate world is not going to sit by on opportunities; they are going to look for loopholes of some sort to generate more power, more money, more revenue. That seems to be the human condition. So it wouldn’t be drama free, trust me!”
