[This story contains one major spoiler from the first episode of The Madison.]
At the beginning of 2024, Michelle Pfeiffer got a call from her agent that Taylor Sheridan — the prolific hitmaker behind the Yellowstone-verse — wanted to talk to her about a new series.
“I said, ‘Great, have him send the script,’” Pfeiffer recalls to The Hollywood Reporter. “They said, no, there’s no script. You have to go to Texas and meet him, and he would like to talk you through the story and your character.”
So Pfeiffer hopped on a plane to Texas and found herself sitting with Sheridan at his Bosque Ranch outside Weatherford, Texas, discussing what would become the role of Stacy Clyburn in The Madison, the standalone Paramount+ series (not in the Yellowstone-verse) that Sheridan has described as his most intimate work yet.
“He had a general outline, an overview of a story of this affluent family based in New York who really don’t want for anything. And tragedy strikes. It fractures the family. They end up in Montana trying to recover. And it’s tender and visceral and unexpectedly comical at times. Ultimately, they are pulled back together in ways that they never anticipated,” says Pfeiffer of their conversation.
She says she was told very little else in terms of specifics, including more details about her character, Stacy. Then she left.
“He wanted to know who Stacy was before he started writing. I wanted to know who Stacy is before I committed. And so we went back and forth like that for a little while, and it became clear to me I wasn’t going to win this battle,” she says with a laugh. “So I asked Helen Mirren to speak to me about her experience [with 1923].”
Mirren was one of Sheridan’s many A-list lures to television for the Yellowstone prequel 1923, where she played Dutton matriarch Cara Dutton for two seasons. “I have to know something concrete about this guy, this project,” Pfeiffer says of what she asked Mirren. “And she just glowed; she couldn’t say enough nice things. She said the scripts were great, the productions were perfect. She was having the time of her life; she loved Montana. So I took a big leap of faith and I committed. I thought, ‘Well, the guy has a pretty darn good track record.’”
Pfeiffer, who will soon be seen in the Apple TV series Margo’s Got Money Troubles, said that when The Madison came along she had been wanting to do something in television. “I’d been watching all this amazing work being done, and getting really envious!” she says. So, she committed and came on board.
Filming on The Madison didn’t begin until September 2024, and Pfeiffer didn’t get a script until about four weeks before they started shooting.
“That was new territory for me,” she admits. “This idea of starting and not getting the script until a month before we started shooting. I always prep for months in advance. You look at a script and chart it all out, what the journey of your character is. Here, you don’t know what the journey of your character is because you only get a couple scripts at a time. So I was nervous.”
Pfeiffer credits Yellowstone veteran Christina Voros, who directed all six episodes of The Madison season one, for helping her through Sheridan’s process. “She had to do a lot of hand-holding with me, and I learned to trust her immediately,” says Pfeiffer. “In our initial conversations, I think she thought, ‘What have I gotten into with this one?’ (Laughs.) It was a complete and utter joy being directed by her, and I know the entire cast felt that way.”
But that wasn’t the Oscar-nominee’s only challenge once filming began. Sheridan wanted Kurt Russell for the part of her onscreen husband, but when production began on The Madison, Russell was in production on his other series for Apple, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
From left: Kurt Russell as Preston Clyburn with Matthew Fox as Paul Clyburn.
Photo Credit: Emerson Miller/Paramount+
The Madison tells the story of the New York City Clyburn family, led by Pfeiffer’s matriarch, Stacy. As the first episode that released on March 14 revealed, Stacy’s husband, Preston — played by Russell — dies in a plane crash while visiting his brother (played by Matthew Fox) at their Montana ranch. Preston’s death brings Stacy and her family (daughters played by Beau Garrett and Elle Chapman; granddaughters played by Alaina Pollack and Amiah Miller; and a son-in-law played by Patrick J. Adams) to the mountains where the Manhattanites are fish out of water in the place that Preston loved with all of his soul, that they never visited. The first season follows the family discovering what drew Preston to Montana as they deal with their grief and fractured relationships.
“I shot my side of the work before he was cast,” says Pfeiffer of filming all of season one without Russell. “I was not happy about that,” she says with a laugh. “It was touch and go if they were going to make [Kurt’s] schedule work. But Taylor was insisting it was going to happen, so I just decided [in my head], ‘Ok, it’s Kurt.’ And because I know him, that was pretty easy to conjure up.”
Pfeiffer and Sheridan devised a plan to make Russell’s schedule work, and they pitched their unique concept to Paramount. They would film all of his scenes when they returned to film the second season, which they filmed one year later. That also meant that Fox, who played brother Paul, would film all of his season one scenes, which were with Preston, when they returned to film season two in September 2025. Voros also helmed all six episodes of season two.
“I had the monitor to look at for Michelle’s scenes,” Russell tells THR of how he filmed the Preston and Stacy scenes in season one after the fact. “I was working with somebody else. I would watch the scene that she played out and ask the script woman who was playing Stacy, ‘Give me that rhythm. We have to stay in that rhythm.’ So I sort of took it on my own, and it cuts together very well.”
Voros acknowledges that it might seem strange to film this way — and cut together the marriage at the heart of the show in post-production. “But once you see them together, it feels so inevitable, you can’t imagine it being anyone else,” she tells THR.
Russell says his team had been in touch about doing a Sheridan project over the years, but this one — which would reunite him with his Tequila Sunrise co-star — spoke to him from the page. “In order to understand both worlds, it would be nice to get somebody who understands both worlds, and that applies to me,” he shares. “I moved to Colorado when I was 26. But I stayed and remain in this business, and this business primarily functions out of L.A. and New York. I certainly prefer living in Colorado. Things like fly fishing and hunting.”
He continues, “I had four episodes to read [when I signed on] and the character was right there in front of me. I could see what it was and I thought it was terrific. I thought the writing was great. I thought Michelle was going to be great in it, so I had nothing to do but say, ‘If you can work the schedule out, let’s go.’”
Season two, the pair say, will see them filming together for the first time but in a “different way.” The co-stars wouldn’t elaborate, so as to not give away any spoilers. “It’s in a different way. You might see more of us in season two, together,” says Pfeiffer. Russell adds, “Taylor is a good writer.”
The Madison releases the final three episodes of season one Saturday on Paramount+; the first three episodes are now streaming. A release date for season two has yet to be revealed.
