Kurt Russell Says Taylor Sheridan’s Audience Is The ‘Silent Majority’

Kurt Russell received the Monte-Carlo TV Festival’s highest accolade, the Crystal Nymph, this year and is enjoying his TV moment.

“I hadn’t done any television for over 50 years when I did Monarch, and then The Madison,” he told Deadline.

The veteran star plays Preston Clyburn, mostly in flashback, in Taylor Sheridan’s series The Madison, which also stars Michelle Pfeiffer. “It’s really an adult-themed show, because you can’t really appreciate [the story] until you have something like that happen to you at a certain time in your life,” he said about the series. “I’ve never done anything like The Madison in terms of how it hits people.”

On the theme of the show, he continued: “Very few people have the opportunity to have a wonderful 40-year marriage, but where you had no idea how wonderful it was, like Michelle’s character [Stacy Clyburn]. How do you show that, how do you talk about that? She’s so wrought with not just guilt, but angst and anger at herself for not getting all of him.”

Asked who the audience is for Sheridan’s array of shows, Russell said: “It’s the silent majority,” adding there is a relatable quality to his work. “You keep finding yourself saying, ‘I know that moment,’ or ‘I know those people.’”

While The Madison was a big hit out of the gate, Russell said a lot of his work took a while to find an audience.  

“A lot of the movies that I did that became truly beloved or cult classics were just dead on arrival, or they didn’t do very well [at first]. Had it not been for DVDs, my career would have been completely different. I probably have 12 or 15 movies that are in the zeitgeist [and] people love, not from the release of the movie, but from finding it years later.”