5 Years Later, Yellowstone's Controversial Villain Death Makes No Sense (& The Actor Agrees)
While one of Yellowstone’s most cinematic deaths came in the show’s season 4 premiere, this twist was also comically inaccurate and even the star who played the unfortunate character admitted this. Yellowstone is not, for all its merits, a particularly believable show. The story of a multi-generational family of scheming billionaires who are willing to go to murderous extremes to hold onto their sprawling titular ranch, Yellowstone played fast and loose with realism throughout the show’s five seasons.
Essentially The Godfather with horses, Yellowstone depicted the Duttons as ruthless ranchers who often tasked their loyal underlings with the dirty business of holding onto their business empire. For John Dutton’s right-hand man, and his daughter’s eventual love interest, Cole Hauser’s Rip, this frequently meant disposing of business rivals, inconvenient hanger-ons, and anyone else who stood in the way of the family’s criminal empire.
Although Yellowstone’s upcoming 1944 spinoff might have historical distance to excuse its creative license, the original Neo-Western hit had no such excuse. It was a series where things happened because they looked, sounded, or felt cool, realism be damned, and this was never more apparent than in the season 4 premiere and the death of the two-season villain Roark.
Josh Holloway's Roarke Died Way Too Early In His Yellowstone Run
A slick real estate investor and stockbroker, Roark was played by one of the stars of the iconic ABC hit Lost, Josh Holloway. Sawyer’s actor imbued Roark with a mix of Southern charm and memorably smug sleaze as the broker quietly squirreled away pockets of the Dutton’s ranch lands as part of an investment scheme. When the family got wind of his antics, the Duttons used a distinctly old-fashioned murder method to eliminate the villain.
Rip opened a cooler for an unsuspecting Roark while the villain was fly-fishing, freeing a rattlesnake that proceeded to immediately bite Roark’s cheek. This killed him instantly, conveniently allowing Rip to vacate the scene and make the death look like a tragic accident. The only problem is that it typically takes a rattlesnake bite two to three days to kill an adult, if the bite proves fatal at all, and Holloway knew this.
The actor told USA Today, “We talked about that, Taylor and I. I said, at least do the jugular, so we could at least say it was a direct shot. We could say that. And he was like, 'But it looks better here.' And I was like, 'But I wouldn't die that fast!’” Holloway was more right than he knew, as Roark would like not have died within a few hours even if the rattlesnake had clamped straight down on the jugular.
To be fair to the star of the influential hit Lost, a bite to the jugular could have sent Roark to Heaven within an hour, which is far faster than the usual 48–72-hour survival window. However, the instantaneous death depicted in Yellowstone’s season 4 premiere would only make sense if Roark were set upon by numerous rattlesnakes at once, a twist featured in the classic mystery story “Rattlers” from the magazine Rock and a Hard Place.
It goes without saying that some departures from strict realism are necessary in entertainment, even in shows that are ostensibly based on real stories like FX’s The Shards. However, it makes sense that Yellowstone fans were up in arms about Roark’s death, since the character had become a popular antagonist and Holloway’s star power meant he deserved a proper sendoff instead of a rushed and unlikely death.
When an adult is bitten in the face by a rattlesnake like Yellowstone’s Roark, they can anticipate a nasty mark and a lengthy recovery
process, but instant death is a near-impossibly unlikely outcome. However, Sheridan insisted that this version of the death would be the most dramatic and cinematic, meaning Holloway was outvoted, and the scene was shot as scripted. As a result, even half a decade later, Yellowstone viewers are still rightly dubious about the veracity of this pivotal death.