Luke Grimes says some Yellowstone fans still stop him to tell him he is not a real cowboy. His answer is blunt: “Well, of course I'm not, I'm an actor.”
The actor, who attended the Yellowstone Season 5 New York premiere at The Museum of Modern Art on November 7, 2024, said the show changed his life in a way that reached far beyond television. He said it inspired him and his wife to relocate their family to Montana, where he now deals with a different kind of attention.
Grimes said on The Joe Rogan Experience that some longtime Montana residents are unhappy about the influx of new people into the state. He said that after friends from California went on a hike in the valley where he lives, someone wrote “go back” in the dust on their car. He added that he avoids telling people exactly where he lives because they would get “really mad” at him.
That unease cuts against the polished image around Yellowstone, the popular Paramount Network drama that made Grimes a familiar face to viewers who watch Sundays. The show is set to end in November with a batch of episodes that concludes its fifth season, while Grimes’ off-screen life has become tied to the same Montana landscape that helped define the series.
He said the reaction can spill into everyday life, including the possibility of trouble in a bar. “People are super weird about it,” he said, adding that he stays in more and now has “no FOMO about anything anymore,” because he can think, sleep, read and watch films instead. For Grimes, the headline is not just that Yellowstone changed where he lives. It is that the same fame that brought him to Montana also made privacy harder to keep.
