Kevin Costner took home the 2023 Golden Globes’ best actor in a television
drama series award on Tuesday night for his portrayal of Yellowstone’s John Dutton.
Costner announced via an Instagram video on that he and his wife, Christine Baumgartner,
had to miss the award ceremony due to the weather in their home in Santa Barbara, California. “Yesterday we had to pull the kids out of school,” he explained, later adding, “This is the second time in five years that the freeway has flooded out, we found ourselves on the wrong side of the town and we couldn’t get back last night.”
“No one is sadder than us that we couldn’t be there,” he stressed.
Costner beat out Jeff Bridges (The Old Man), Diego Luna (Andor), Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul) and Adam Scott (Severance) for the coveted award.
It is his first time that Costner won in the category, though he’s previously been nominated and won at the Golden Globes for directing and acting in a limited series.
The actor stars in the popular Paramount+ series as John Dutton, the patriarch and owner of Montana’s largest ranch as he navigates conflict within his own family and with the bordering Broken Rock Indian Reservation, national park and developers.
Since its debut in 2018, Tyler Sheridan’s series has inspired multiple spin-offs, including the prequel 1883 starring Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, and the Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford-led prequel, 1923.
Costner previously told PEOPLE he thinks what “makes the show so successful” is how it’s intentional with it world-building and character development.
“I’ve always believed a good Western isn’t always just rushing towards its gunfight,” he said in June. “If you can create language and situations, and then you end up at a gunfight, I think it can be an amazing movie or TV show. But I think if you’re trying to get there so fast that you don’t understand the people, or it’s not complicated, then it’s a problem.”
Kevin Lynch for Paramount Network Kevin Costner in Yellowstone
He also said he returns often to the western genre because he’s intrigued by capturing “the authenticity of what it took to come across the ocean to move west where there was no law, there was no protection.”
He continued, “To drag your wife and your children and put them in imminent danger — people thirsted to have something of their own.”The 80th annual Golden Globe Awards were broadcast live on NBC and Peacock.