Spoilers below for the latest episode of Yellowstone Season 4, so be warned!
Even though Wes Bentley's Jamie Dutton doesn't often go into situations with malicious intentions to harm his family, the Yellowstone character is an assembly line of pretty fucked up decisions. And it looks like this latest situation involving his biological father's connection to the attacks on the family could indeed cause a great divide like no other. But until that happens, it does seem as if Jamie can always count on Luke Grimes' Kayce to have his back, at least in spirit. The way the actor puts it, that loyalty sounds like it might be pretty specific to his character.
In talking about all things Yellowstone Season 4 with TV Insider, Luke Grimes was asked about Kayce’s feelings about Jamie, and here’s how he explained it:
Kayce’s a benefit of the doubt kind of guy, especially when it comes to Jamie. Obviously he can see on the surface, there’s evil, there’s bad, there’s darkness within a lot of his family members and the world that he lives in, but he’s always trying to see the good and that’s something I really love about Kayce. He tries to operate out of love, and I think he has a lot of love for Jamie and it would take a whole lot for him to lose that or for him to treat him any other way.
To fully clarify, he’s a benefit of the doubt guy when it comes to people who didn’t just ambush his family; those people faced the vastly lethal brunt of Kayce’s vengeance in earlier episodes this season. I definitely can’t argue with that being his general approach to life otherwise, though. Clearly, Kayce has some of John Dutton’s anger issues and snap judgments, but he’s on the opposite end of that cheery rainbow of influence from Cole Hauser’s rage-filled Rip.
By all means, Jamie also hasn’t completely fucked over Kayce in the same kinds of ways that he’s destroyed other relationships, which has helped keep the walls of their sibling-dom from collapsing into dust heaps. He is, after all, the one person John could put in charge of tasking Jamie with looking into the imprisoned Riggins. It’s just that nobody could have foreseen how closely Jamie would be tied to the attempts made on the other Duttons’ lives. I’m not 100% certain that Jamie will keep everything to himself now that he knows the real deal, but Kayce would likely be the only person he could trust with the info.
For what it’s worth, Wes Bentley has the same kind of optimistic outlook about Jamie, going so far as to say he could foresee a future where his character and Kelly Reilly’s Beth could return to more neutral ground rather than a future where his head is destined to be mounted on her wall. But after the surprise return of Christina coupled with Jamie’s son, I’m not so sure even Kayce could find ways to forgive his brother for keeping the truth hidden from John and others, although Luke Grimes also talked about his love for Monica and Tate superseding his loyalty to John and others, saying:
Yeah, absolutely. I think him and Monica are soulmates and in a way, he knew going in that he sort of was choosing them over his family. Obviously he’s tried everything he knows how to do to make it work, but I think he knew going in that was going to be problematic.
Completely different situational details, but if anybody could find some empathy for Jamie as a father trying to keep a connection to a son he just met, it’d be Kayce. If Beth finds out he has a kid, though, hot damn, the (adult) bodies are going to burn and burn and burn. Her vengeance will not be denied.
Yellowstone airs Sunday nights on Paramount Network at 8:00 p.m. ET, so be sure to keep tuning in to see how far this brotherly love will go.
