“I started early and stayed late, day after day, year after year. It took 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success.”                  Lionel Messi

2011 – Hollywood, California: Actor Taylor Sheridan was excited to be returning for the third season as chief deputy David Hale in the highly acclaimed television crime series Sons of Anarchy. That was until Sheridan’s attorney tried to negotiate his contract and realized Sheridan was being offered half the money most of the cast were getting.

When the attorney questioned the reason for the pay discrepancy, he was told bluntly, “We are not going to pay Sheridan any more money, because he’s not worth it. He is the 11th actor on the call sheet, and that’s all he will ever be. We can find 50 guys to replace him. He’s never going to be a lead actor.” After two decades of struggling as an actor, Sheridan had had enough. Despite being broke and sometimes living in a tent with his dog, he quit the television series.

Sheridan Taylor Gibler Jr grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. He changed his name to Taylor Sheridan when he moved to Hollywood. His family owned a ranch in Cranfills Gap, Texas, and they often visited on the weekends. Sheridan loved being a weekend cowboy, riding horses, and tending cattle.

He got pneumonia in the 7^th grade and ended up at home for 2 months watching old westerns and became fascinated with movies and acting. He majored in theater at Southwest Texas State University before dropping out of college. He painted houses, mowed lawns, and tried to figure out what he wanted to do.

Sheridan eventually migrated to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. After five years of mostly bit parts, he graduated to prominent supporting roles in the television series Veronica Mars and later Sons of Anarchy.

After the salary dispute with Sons of Anarchy, Sheridan’s character was written out of the script. “I was really broke,” he says, “but I made the decision to stick it out and not go home to Texas.” Although he had no experience with writing, he decided to write his own scripts and screenplays about what he knew best: cowboys, ranching, and life in West Texas.

Though writing came easier for Sheridan than acting, it took four years of scraping by before he finally wrote the screenplay for the highly acclaimed movie Sicario (2015), followed by Hell or High Water (2016), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, a pinnacle achievement for a writer on his second screenplay.

Then Sheridan got a strange idea: What if the movie, The Godfather, had taken place on a large ranch in Montana? It took him 10 weeks of 14 to 16-hour days to write the script for Yellowstone. When he took the television series script to Hollywood’s major players, almost every one of them turned him down. Sheridan was told, “Nobody is producing TV westerns these days. That genre is dead.”

Eventually, Chris McCarthy, President of Paramount Network, liked what he read. Negotiations almost broke down when Sheridan insisted that he be the sole writer and director for the project. McCarthy took the gamble and paid the 47-year-old actor-turned-writer $500 million for the rights to Yellowstone and two prequels, 1883 and 1923.

Yellowstone debuted in 2018, and after six seasons, it remains the most popular television series, consistently ranking as the #1 Cable Drama and drawing massive audiences of 10 to 15 million viewers. Taylor Sheridan now has 10 Paramount Network series either on the air or in the works.

Of his more than 20+ year journey to success, Sheridan says, “What kept me going was my stubbornness and a refusal to fail. I refused to throw in the towel. One thing that I can control is how hard I work. I can beat 95% of the competition by outworking them. But like most overnight successes, it took me 20 years to have some success.”

Today, writer, producer, director, and actor Taylor Sheridan remains a cowboy at heart. He owns and operates two ranches in west Texas, including the legendary 266,000-acre Four Sixes (6666), one of the largest cattle ranches in America. In 2021, he was inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame.