Yellowstone‘s Luke Grimes moved out to Montana — but why was it met with some backlash by locals?
Grimes rose to fame playing Kayce Dutton on Yellowstone, which ran from 2018 to 2024. He reprised the role for CBS’ Marshals spinoff, which came years after Grimes relocated from Los Angeles to the Bitterroot Valley in Montana.
The actor and his wife, Bianca Rodrigues Grimes, moved in 2020 after Grimes fell in love with the area after Yellowstone. The decision to start fresh was met with a surprising reaction from his neighbors.
“I was going up there three or four months out of the year, and then anytime we’d get done filming, and I’d come back here, it sort of felt like I was leaving home rather than going back home,” Grimes told Fox News Digital in February. “It was just a gear change that slowly happened over a course of a few years and then, yeah, my wife and I just fell in love with it and decided to live there.”
Grimes later revealed that some of the Montana locals haven’t been as welcoming to him and his family. (Grimes and his wife welcomed a son in 2024.)
“I can’t go to bars there anymore ‘cause whatever that one idiot is, is at the bar, and he can’t wait to start a fight with me,” he shared on the Joe Rogan Experience in March. “Just like can’t wait to do it because it’s like a win-win for him, you know? He gets to sue me or something. I don’t know, but it’s a lose-lose for me.”
Grimes continued: “The valley that I live in, we had some people come visit us. Our friends from California drove out, and we went on a hike, and we were in their car. And they had, you know, Cali plates. We get off the hike, and someone had written ‘go back’ in the dust on their car. Like, people are super weird about it. So I don’t tell anyone exactly where I’m at because they would get really mad at me.”
At the time, Grimes also addressed criticism that Kayce isn’t a Dutton who deserved his own Yellowstone spinoff, Marshals.
“I’m my own worst critic,” Grimes told Entertainment Weekly in February. “I was like, ‘If you take a poll of who people want to have a spinoff, I don’t know if Kayce would be top of that list. I think there’s other characters that they would rather see.’”
Grimes used that as motivation, adding, “So there was a fire under me. Like, it has to be good. If it’s not good, I’d rather not do it. We tried really hard to make sure that any of the original Yellowstone fans would have something to grasp onto.”
He continued: “But if you’d never seen Yellowstone, we wanted this show to make sense on its own as well. I think we accomplished that as much as we possibly could.”
