SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from the Season 5, Episode 12 episode of “Yellowstone,” “Counting Coup,
The fan-favorite cowboy always lit up the “Yellowstone” bunkhouse, fueled by an easy energy from actor Denim Richards.
Paired with that was a budding romance with Teeter (Jennifer Landon), which was cut short by Colby’s untimely death in Sunday’s episode. He went out on top, saving Carter (Finn Little) from a wild horse that eventually kicked him one too many times. Variety spoke with Richards about where he was when he first heard the news of his character’s death, preparing for his final romantic moment with Landon and the joy of acting opposite Kelly Reilly’s Beth.
When did you first find out that Colby was going to die?
That happened in May. I was coming back from Dallas, from the U.S.-Africa Business Summit, and I got the call. I had a very beautifully sensitive conversation with Christina [Alexandra Voros, executive producer and director of the episode], and she’s just such a giving person. If anybody ever gets the opportunity to work with her, I think they will all say the same thing: That she’s just so warm and kind and professional. Of course, as an artist, you’re going through all of these tremendously wild ups and downs because sometimes we feel like we’re navigating the character and the human. So much of our identity feels like it gets tied to both. She said, “I’m here if you need anything.” Luckily, things never got to too much of a down point.
How did you prepare for your final phone call with Jennifer, knowing it’d be Colby and Teeter’s last big moment together?
I think the goal is that you don’t prepare for that, right? You don’t look at it as this is going to be the last time, because it’s not as though Colby was planning to die. So I think that if you play the character as if he’s planning to die, it tips the hand of the audience too much. It feels a little bit too contrived, it doesn’t feel natural and organic. As crazy as it sounds, it just should feel like it’s just an everyday occurrence. Early on in my career, I think that would have been a little bit harder for me to be able to do because you’re always trying to separate the fact that you know what the outcome is. As you start to get a little bit older, you realize our job is to service the story and to separate your own personal pride and ego from that. At the end of the day, it’s just another phone call to this wild and wacky person that I guess you just happened to be falling in love with. Because of playing it like that, I think it lands differently because it didn’t feel like the audience saw it coming.
I’m sure there are so many, but is there one favorite memory you have from filming the show?
We had this scene where it was the first time Kelly’s character comes into the bunkhouse and has a moment with Carter (Finn Little) and Rip (Cole Hauser) and we’re all around the bunkhouse. It was this massive day, there were 13 or 14 of us all in the bunkhouse. It was really beautiful to get these kinds of opportunities with people you don’t get to engage with, because Kelly’s character is doing these other things. So that was a beautiful moment. In between that, we played poker around the table. I remember we had like a lightning strike that had happened, so we had to shut down for over an hour. Ryan Bingham is playing his guitar, and we’re teaching Kelly how to play some type of poker. In those moments, you sit there and go, “Man, we could do this forever.” It’s those types of moments that I will always cherish.
Is there something you wish you could have done in the series that you didn’t have a chance to do?
Hindsight is always great, but I’ve tried to train myself as an artist and professional to live every moment genuinely. The job is to fall in love with the process and don’t get tied to the outcome, because we have to do so much preparation, and oftentimes the outcome doesn’t come to what we want. We do so much work and then we don’t get the show or the gig. If you tie your experience of whether or not you’re good to whether or not you were successful at booking something, I feel like you’re going down a really, really dark place.
I think that one of the reasons this show has been so successful is because even as it was getting more high-profile, the artists that we had on board were still able to put aside their egos and personal feelings to just service the story. I went from being relatively unknown in 2017, and now here I am talking with you guys. Who would have thought?
Your character had a very noble death, but “Yellowstone” has a history of killing people off in wild ways. Do you have a favorite?
Even though I don’t know that anybody died in it, I still go back to Season 2, where we’re just unleashing a bull in a bar and then getting into a massive fight. That was wild. There have been so many crazy things that have happened, and I think that that speaks to the simplicity of Colby’s death, because it is more of what really would happen in the cowboy world. And I think Taylor tried to infuse a little bit more of that this season, that this is a very simple death, but very true to what reality can be for a cowboy and a cowboy’s life.
Did you have a watch party last night for your last big episode?
I did not — I actually didn’t even watch it at all. I watched clips of it later on, but I have been replaying this moment all the time since May, and it’s been emotionally challenging just for me as an individual to be living with it. There was so much excitement coming into this season, so many people saying, “Colby and Teeter, they’re finally going to get together, we’re finally going to see that moment!” I felt like yesterday would have just been too much for me. But of course, the moment that I went online and I started seeing the thousands of responses, I thought, ‘Wow, it really meant something.”
When I actually watched it saw how Taylor eloquently pieced all of this together, it was a beautiful way to go out if you were going to go out. But I was treating it like it was another day at the office. It was like a stress test for me. If you want to do these things, if you’re going to have a long career, you’re going to probably have one or two more of these types of things. So you’re gonna have to be able to handle them with a level of professionalism and class, and that’s what I’m trying to exercise myself in right now. Otherwise, I would probably be crying in every interview.
Have you started to incorporate any cowboy gear into your normal wardrobe?
Not really. As much as I love the cowboy lifestyle, it’s not really Denim’s lifestyle. I dress in a lot of African attire, usually. Occasionally I’ll throw on some cowboy boots. It is funny though, because like anytime I go anywhere, somebody’s like, “Where’s your hat?” Or sometimes they don’t even believe that it’s me because I dress so differently. Just know I took every piece of gear that I’ve worn on that show with me. So the picture that I posted on my Instagram, all that stuff is sitting in my office.
You have your feature debut as a writer and director, “The Forgotten Ones,” set as your next project. What can you reveal about that?
“The Forgotten Ones” is something that we’re very, very excited about. Right now we’re in that kind of weird, tenuous spot about exactly what the distribution looks like. It’s a historical period piece that I’ll be excited to talk about soon, separate from the tragic, tragic death of Colby Mayfield on Paramount’s No. 1 show, “Yellowstone.” [laughs]
