Taylor Sheridan: 11 Facts About The Yellowstone Creator's Transformation Into A TV Icon

There is a world somewhere out there, in some alternate dimension, where Taylor Sheridan never left Texas to become an actor. Or maybe, one where he left Texas to become an actor but never dreamed of writing his own scripts. Or maybe, one where he wrote the hard-hitting screenplays for "Sicario," "Hell or High Water," and "Wind River" but never branched out into television — meaning, he never co-created the hit Paramount Network series "Yellowstone" and never built a miniature television empire, got inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame, or returned to his home state as owner of one of its most famous cattle ranches.

Luckily, we do not live in such an alternate dimension. The Taylor Sheridan of our world has done all of those things and more. After nearly two decades as a television actor, Sheridan bet on himself and made the jump into feature screenwriting, becoming one of the hottest writers in Hollywood for his tales of masculinity, family, and the politics of the modern West. His most recent project, the "Yellowstone" prequel "1923" starring Harrison Ford (in his first regular television role), premiered on the Paramount+ streaming service in December 2022. Let's take a look at Sheridan's journey from Texas to Hollywood and back.

Both the cowboy life and the theatre life offer an opportunity to create one's own myth, and as a teenager Sheridan was immersed in both. On his summer getaways to Cranfills Gap he was working on a nearby ranch for $400 a month and a spot in the bunkhouse (via a 2020 profile for Texas Highways), but during the school year at Paschal High in Fort Worth, he was a full-blooded theatre kid, starring in a production of "Grease" and even landing a paying gig at Stage West Theatre at age 16.

Back in those days, however, Sheridan was still known by his birth name: Sheridan Taylor Gibler, Jr. It would be several more years before he would lose the Gibler and reshuffle his first and last names, after moving to Los Angeles to pursue a screen acting career in earnest. And like his name and birthplace, there's another key biographical detail that Sheridan plays coy with: His date of birth. Depending on where you look, he has any number of different birthdays listed, which is apparently the way he likes it. "I've got, like, six different birthdays," Sheridan told Fort Worth magazine. "I mean, what people don't realize is, when you start posting where people are born and when they're born, I only need one more thing to take your identity."

But Sheridan's career wasn't an immediate Hollywood fairy tale. His first on-screen role was in a Season 3 episode of the Chuck Norris western series "Walker, Texas Ranger" in 1995, and he finished up the 1990s with a handful of day-player parts on shows like "Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman," "Party of Five," and the Pamela Anderson spy series "VIP." In between such roles, he used his skills as a horseman to pick up extra cash.

The early 2000s continued apace, with Sheridan getting cast a few times a year for one episode of some show or another, be it "Star Trek: Enterprise" or "CSI." But two roles in the mid-2000s would change the course of his career. The first was a five-episode stint on the much-loved UPN teen detective drama "Veronica Mars," then in its second season. In 2008, he was cast as straight-laced deputy police chief David Hale on the FX "Hamlet"-with-bikers drama "Sons of Anarchy." It was by far the biggest role of Sheridan's career up to that point; Hale was a supporting character in the show's first two seasons before meeting a bloody end in the Season 3 premiere — apparently, after salary negotiations between Sheridan and the producers broke down.

Changing careers after 20 years — which is essentially what Sheridan did — takes a lot of support, emotionally and otherwise. At his side during this uncertain transition was his wife, actor and model Nicole Sheridan (née Muirbrook). Born and raised in Utah, in the 2000s and early 2010s she could be seen in ad campaigns for Axe body spray and Old Navy, and made just a handful of appearances in film and television. These days, she oversees the Sheridan family-owned Bosque Ranch (named for the county where Cranfills Gap resides), including her own namesake bar, and devotes her time to charitable pursuits such as the National Cowgirl Museum and the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center. The couple have a son together, Gus, named for the character played by Robert Duvall in the seminal Western miniseries "Lonesome Dove."

Like her husband, though, an unusual bit of mythology has gathered around Sheridan. In 2008 she had a brief, unnamed role on an episode of "How I Met Your Mother." The advertising for that episode teased that the eponymous Mother would finally make an appearance. A blog post on Vulture speculated that Sheridan's (then Muirbrook's) character, who shares a quick word with series protagonist Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), was in fact the long-awaited mother. There is no evidence to support this claim, and of course Cristin Milioti would play that character five years later in the show's final season. Yet, from this single blog post has grown an internet urban legend that can be found on Sheridan's Wikipedia page and on several biographical sites. 

Once upon a time, in the 1990s, there was a country music-focused cable channel called The Nashville Network, or TNN. In 2000, its parent company Viacom rebranded it as The National Network, ditching most of the music but keeping the populist heartland vibe. Three years later, TNN rebranded again as the bro-focused Spike TV, and in 2017 it changed names and formats yet again to the more tony-sounding Paramount Network. For the network's inaugural foray into original dramatic programming, incoming network president Keith Cox knew exactly what he wanted — a sprawling, cinematic American family drama — and he knew exactly who he wanted it from.

Co-created by Sheridan and "Sons of Anarchy" producer John Linson, "Yellowstone" gave Cox exactly what the network needed: "I wanted to do something grounded, very authentic but very Americana," he told Deadline when the project was announced, "harkening back to these big, exciting fun dysfunctional families." Critics may quibble about how grounded it is exactly, but the story of the Dutton family (led by Kevin Costner's patriarch John) and their impossibly large Montana ranch proved to be the perfect introduction to the Paramount Network, pointing toward the future but with one cowboy boot planted in the past going all the way back to the TNN days.

Just as "Yellowstone" christened the Paramount Network in 2018, the prequel series "1883," which follows the Dutton family ancestors (Tim McGraw and Faith Hill) in the titular year, did the same for the Paramount+ streaming service in 2021 (give or take "Picard"). Rather than write a second season of "1883" — seeing as he had killed off most of his main characters at the end of the first — Sheridan moved forward with a brand new prequel set four decades later. "1923" continues the story of the Duttons in Montana but with a global scope, examining the aftereffects of the first World War and the burgeoning cattle trade in British colonial Africa. Anchoring this worldwide action are a pair of worldwide movie stars, Harrison Ford and Dame Helen Mirren.

So how did Sheridan land Ford, who had never been a series lead before, and Mirren, who hadn't done it since "Prime Suspect" in the 1990s? Well, as in most things, it helps to have a scenic Texas ranch, a lot of money and confidence, and a whole lot of nice wine. Sheridan invited them both to Bosque Ranch before the scripts had even been written and pressed them to commit. "I need to know who I'm writing for," he told Deadline shortly before the series premiered. "I poured about two bottles of wine down [Ford]. He said yes. I got him on a plane as fast as I could, closed the deal and said, send me the next one. Then came Helen, and same thing. Have a glass of wine."