Kevin Costner says he won't 'rush to go see' John Dutton's fate on Yellowstone

After months of speculation about how Yellowstone would deal with Kevin Costner's absence, viewers finally got their answer on Sunday night.

However, there's one person who isn't eager to go watch the revealing episode — Costner himself. "I didn't see it," the actor told Michael Smerconish while appearing on SiriusXM. "I heard it's a suicide, so that doesn't make me want to rush to go see it."

In fact, Costner didn't even realize that the episode, which leads into the back-half of the show's final season, was set to air. "I'm going to be perfectly honest," he said. " I didn't know it was actually airing last night.... I didn't realize yesterday was the thing. Sometimes I'm like just a passenger in my life, you know, there's a lot going on. And somebody said, you know, it played last night? And I said, ‘Hmm, okay.’ So no, I found out about it this morning actually."

As many likely expected, Costner's character John Dutton, who had become Governor Dutton of Montana over the course of five seasons, did not make it out of Yellowstone alive. Early in the episode, Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Kayce (Luke Grimes) arrive at the governor's mansion, which is swarming with police, to discover that their father appears to have died by suicide.

Host Smerconish pointed out that John Dutton hardly seemed like "a suicide kind of guy," and Costner replied, "Well, they're pretty smart people. Maybe it's a red herring. Who knows? They're very good. And they'll figure that out."

Costner was dead-on. Later in the episode, we learned that Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), the girlfriend of estranged Dutton brother Jamie (Wes Bentley), took out a hit on John's life, instructing the contract killer to make Dutton's death look like a suicide.

It's unlikely Dutton will rest in peace, given that Beth has already vowed to kill Jamie for the murder. But perhaps Costner will breathe easier without ever watching the episode, knowing that his time on the show is done.

The Oscar-winner has found himself in a swirl of speculation throughout the last several months with creator Taylor Sheridan expressing disappointment at Costner's exit, while Costner insisted that he tried to make himself available in spite of the show's constantly shifting production timelines.

Earlier this year, Costner confirmed his exit from the Paramount Network series. “I just want to reach out and let you know that after this long year and a half of working on Horizon and doing all the things that that’s required, and thinking about Yellowstone, that beloved series that I love, that I know you love, I just realized that I’m not going to be able to continue season 5B or into the future," Costner said in a video. "I just wanted to let you know that I won't be returning. I love the relationship that we've been able to develop, and I'll see you at the movies."

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Still, star Kelly Reilly previously told Entertainment Weekly that John Dutton's absence was always part of the plan for the show's conclusion. "The absence was part of the ending," Reilly said. "That's not something that we had to pivot, that was already written into the tapestry of the story. It was always going to happen, it just happened a little bit differently."