‘Yellowstone’ used these code words to keep John Dutton’s death a secret

nypost.com:

Kevin Costner left the show amid rumors of an alleged feud with creator and showrunner Taylor Sheridan. Spoiler alert: In the premiere episode for the second half of Season 5, “Yellowstone” deals with Costner’s exit by killing off his character, John Dutton.Executive producer Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed the episode, told the Hollywood Reporter that there were code words used during filming in order to keep this plot development top secret. “It’s so weird to talk about it all, because it has been so clandestine for so long,” she told the outlet. “We didn’t talk about it as a death.

Any time there is a death or some sort of event, we called it an ‘arrival,’” she explained. “And we gave John’s character a pseudonym.

We called him ‘Crosby.’ We were calling the opening scene, ‘Beth discovers that Crosby has arrived.’ It was on call sheets and the crew were like, ‘Who is Crosby?

And, where’s he coming from?’”Voros added that after she did some research, she discovered that John Schuyler Crosby was the last governor of Montana before it was turned into a state in the 1880s. “It was a very random, obscure, esoteric reference [by Sheridan],” she said. “Yellowstone” follows the Dutton family, owners of the largest ranch in Montana, including patriarch John (Costner), who had become the governor of Montana before his death, and his adult children, quiet Kayce (Luke Grimes), villainous Jamie (Wes Bentley), headstrong Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Beth’s cowboy husband, Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser).