The Kurt Russell screen image is so familiar, and so much larger than life, that it is easy to forget how far those characters are from the man himself.
From Snake Plissken in Escape from New York to Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, he has built a career on men who carry a certain weight from the moment they appear. What he had not done, he says, was play someone who felt like the real him.
“I’ve been doing this for 65 years, and I’ve never played a character that was really a lot like me, and this guy is,” Russell tells The National.
Russell plays Preston Clyburn in Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ drama The Madison, which follows a New York family pulled to Montana after his death. By the end of the first six-episode season, streaming on Tod in the Middle East, Preston has emerged as the show’s emotional centre despite being gone for much of it – a husband, father and outdoorsman whose life is understood most clearly in his absence.
The connection Russell describes is easy enough to trace. Preston belongs partly to New York and partly to Montana, moving between city life and a more rooted outdoor existence. Russell's own life was shaped by much the same tension: early roots in Massachusetts and Maine, a career built through Los Angeles and an adult life anchored in Colorado.
That shared geography matters, but it is the marriage at the centre of the story that seems to have landed most deeply. Preston and Stacy are written as two people with a long, fully lived-in relationship behind them, and the series is shaped by what that love looks like once one half of it is gone.
That love is part of why he sees himself so strongly in it. He's been madly in love with his partner Goldie Hawn since they first met as children the mid-1960s – and since they officially got together in 1983, that love has only grown deeper.
"I said, you know what? This is the right one to be myself in – to explore myself in. For me, it speaks to me the way I would want it to be and I think I'm like a lot of men who've lived lives that varied from what it looked like it was going to be. My life became something else because I drove it," says Russell.
In his character's love, he sees his own. Which is why their bittersweet tragedy resonated so deeply.
"I had a hard time getting through the scripts. They just kept hitting me really hard, and I felt that that was a big part of this show's potential, ability to grab an audience. Its writing was so authentic," says Russell.
“It was so powerful for it to have a serious, true love relationship with someone, and then for one of those people to go, and for the other to realise they didn’t know how good it was – that they didn’t know there was so much more to it, and they’re not going to let that go."
That sense of late understanding gives the show its weight. Russell talks about Sheridan’s writing in the show from a purely emotional perspective – how grief settles into daily life, how it changes the rhythm of a family and how humour still finds its way in.
“What I like about what Taylor does is he makes it humorous, as well as a lot of gallows humour always, always around it,” Russell says. “The cog that was in the middle of it all is gone, and you can only deal with it. You can’t get it back.”
He also sees The Madison as a very different kind of Taylor Sheridan series from Yellowstone or Landman. His other work often leans on masculine tension and hard-edged conflict. This one is female-focused, softer in outlook and more interested in love, loss and the emotional aftermath of both.
Place carries just as much weight. Russell talks about New York City and the Madison River as the two defining presences in the series, and that pull between them gives the drama its shape. One is dense, enclosed and familiar. The other is slower, wider and filled with the things Preston had wanted his family to know.
That is also from where the second season will expand. Russell says the next chapter, which has been filmed but not given a release date, gives Preston and Stacy’s relationship more room, after a first season in which the marriage is often felt at a distance. “In many, many ways, it’s better,” he says. “You see them together a lot.”
Preston’s story turns on a painful realisation: that the depth of a shared life is often understood most clearly after it is broken. Russell talks about the role as if he felt the inverse of that.
In playing Preston, he seems to have found a way of looking more closely at the kind of enduring love he still has in his own life. Perhaps that's why it means so much to him.
The Madison season one is now streaming on Tod and Paramount+
