She went to the train station.
On Sunday’s episode of “Yellowstone,” the evil lawyer Sarah (Dawn Olivieri) got killed. Sarah was dating Jamie (Wes Bentley).
“I always sort of know it’s coming,” Olivieri, 43, told The Hollywood Reporter, referring to playing a character who gets killed.
“And to read it is like, ‘OK, here we go.’ We got what we all wanted. I think everyone is happy that the train station came,” she added.
“Train station” is “Yellowstone” lingo for killing someone off.
“Yellowstone,” which is currently airing its fifth and final season, follows the Dutton family, owners of the largest ranch in Montana, including patriarch John (Kevin Costner), who was also the Governor, and his adult children Kayce (Luke Grimes), Jamie (Wes Bentley), Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Beth’s husband, Rip (Cole Hauser).
The show returned on Nov. 10 and kicked off the second half of Season 5 by killing off John, since Costner left the show amid rumors of behind-the-scenes strife.
A hit man fatally shot John, and staged it to look like a suicide. Jamie was partly responsible, as Sarah (Dawn Olivieri), arranged it, but Jamie was not directly involved.
Now, Sarah has faced deadly consequences for arranging Jon’s death. The episode ended in a shocking way, with Sarah herself getting taken out by a hit man, as Jamie helplessly listened on the phone, panicking.
The show didn’t officially confirm who took Sarah out yet, as presumably that will be revealed in a future episode. There are many possibilities: it could have been Beth or Kayce, since they’re determined to get revenge for their late father. It could have been the hitman Sarah hired, tying up loose ends – since Montana cops announced that John’s death is being investigated as a murder. So, their staged suicide didn’t work.
Or, it could even be someone else that the show has yet to reveal.
“It’s a funny thing, it’s a choice that you make. I could have played that differently,” Olivieri said about Sarah’s final moments.
“I could have played her hard and cool, and that she had to keep it together. The word ‘villain’ is sort of this over-arching label that we put on the bad character that the hero is fighting against.”
She added that she doesn’t necessarily see Sarah as a “villain.”
“A villain is a very strong-minded, strong-willed person that maybe has a little trauma in their life early on that has created this sort of work-obsessed, power-obsessed … even to have the awareness of power that villains do I think makes you a villain.”
She added, “a villain is just extremely strong as a human being, and that’s very off-putting for most people.”
Olivieri, who was also in the “Yellowstone” spinoff show “1883,” said, “When you create the arc of that type of character, you are always going to start in a stronger place than you end, because the evolution of that character, of that demise, is always going to be coming back to this thing that makes you human. That’s the most interesting journey.”
She continued, “It’s not interesting to watch someone who has all the power and who is the best at everything die. You are like, ‘Great, goodbye.’ You don’t care about that person. My aim with every character is that, maybe I do strong-willed dastardly things with a lot of zeal, but at the end, I want to see her unraveled and broken apart.”
Olivieri said the moment Sarah died was “the only moment” series creator Taylor Sheridan wrote for the character “to potentially even expose that [human part of her]— and I was like, ‘I’m going for it.’ In whatever tiny capacity I could have it. So to have that moment with Sarah was my goalpost.”
Regarding Sarah and Jamie’s fraught relationship, she said, “We all want to be touched in a loving way when we’re OK and safe, and when we’ve been treated right. And Sarah is not OK. She’s not right. So to her, power is love and the transaction is what feels like love: ‘You care about me if you win with me, or if you listen to everything I say.’”
Olivieri, who was also in “SEAL Team,” added, “I think that was her way of love, and I think Jamie responded to that. We were able to see that he also spoke that language, and that was the connection they had. They could have been an insane powerful couple, who would have been very scary to be working up against! Because she completed him in a way that he needed her to.”
She described Jamie as “weak.”
“He couldn’t make decisions. He was lacking the self-initiative and power, and she showed up and she was like, ‘I’ll give it to you. I can coach you through it. I will give you the confidence that you need to lead this thing,’ and that’s a power couple.”
“Yellowstone” airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on Paramount.
