With the first season of “Dutton Ranch” now behind us, every character on the Paramount+ drama can breathe a sigh of relief that they survived… for now. After all, unless your name is Beth or Rip, tomorrow is never guaranteed on the “Yellowstone” spin-off. Just ask Rob-Will, a seemingly pivotal character to the series, who met his untimely end in the finale.
Needless to say, the show’s actors read every new script with their fingers crossed, hoping their characters would still be alive by the time they reached the last page. Juan Pablo Raba, who plays Beulah’s scorned “son” Joaquin, tells TVLine he was certain that it was curtains for Joaquin in Episode 6 when Chet approached him with a whole lot of anger — and a gun.
“When I first got the episode, I had no idea what was going to happen,” Raba recalls. “Cole [Hauser] and Kelly [Reilly] know because they’re producers, but for the rest of us, every single script is a wild card. So I started reading the script, and when I saw Chet that pulls a gun and walks towards Joaquin, I was like, ‘Well, this is it. It was fun while it lasted.'”
Fully accepting that Joaquin was being killed off, Raba admits that he was surprised he hadn’t heard from one of the show’s producers ahead of time. “I’m thinking, oh my God, I would have hoped that somebody would have called me to tell me, ‘Hey, buddy, this is it,'” he says. “But I’m just like, damn it, it feels so soon.”
Fortunately, Raba turned the page and realized that it wasn’t Joaquin’s time; instead, Chet was shot and killed by Miguel, who had been lurking in the shadows with a firearm of his own. Raba says the positive outcome for his character “was a big surprise story-wise.”
