On Yellowstone, Colby (Denim Richards) and Teeter (Jen Landon) have been through hell and back, from the vicious attack by Wade Morrow (Boots Southerland) to Teeter narrowly surviving a firing over something that wasn’t her fault. But fans keep rooting for the odd pair.
In a new Outsider interview, Richards said his character’s scenes with Teeter have illuminated more facets to Colby than audiences got to see before the pink-haired ranch hand showed up. And he offered some behind-the-scenes details about how Yellowstone co-creator Taylor Sheridan prepped him for Teeter’s arrival.
Richards also dished about Landon’s audition tape, which he got to see early on. Teeter is foul-mouthed yet barely intelligible. (Sheridan writes out her lines phonetically, so Landon knows how to pronounce Teeter’s unique drawl.) And amusingly, Teeter’s quirky pronunciation initially threw Richards off.
‘Yellowstone’ Star Explains How Teeter Brought Out Different Sides of Colby
“Taylor was really excited about Jen. [And] rightfully so. She’s such a great artist,” Richards recounted. “I think it was halfway maybe through Season 2, or something of that nature. And I remember we were coming out of doing a bunkhouse scene. And Taylor was there. He said, ‘Denim, you got to see this.’ And he pulls up his phone, and he was showing us her audition tape.”
“I was really confused, because he was so excited about it,” Richards continued. “And I was like, ‘But you can’t understand anything that she’s saying in the audition. Usually, the mode of a successful audition is how articulate you’re able to be.’ But Taylor is like, ‘No, that’s the whole point.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ And she’s going to come on the show. She’s going to poke you and prod you and all these other things. I’m like, ‘All right, cool.’ So it was something that I knew about maybe a year before.”
The Yellowstone star went on to explain how Teeter’s arrival created an opportunity for Colby. And by extension, for him as an actor. He said the scenes with Teeter brought a little more autonomy and offered audiences a window onto his character that they didn’t have before.
“It was very exciting just to be able to see her, to see development, obviously to seek Colby’s opportunity, to do some different things that have a little bit more autonomy,” Richards explained. “And for the audience to kind of get to know his character a little bit more. Especially in such a different way, other than kind of the interaction with all the other men that are in the bunkhouse. So it’s been such an exciting and very, very big opportunity to really kind of ad-lib some things as well.”
