‘1883’: Faith Hill Reveals Why She Finally Agreed to Act Alongside Her Husband

Faith Hill and Tim McGraw are finally hitting the screen together in 1883, taking their real-life marriage into the Yellowstone universe to play married couple James and Margaret Dutton as they make the journey west to Montana. Ahead of Sunday’s premiere of the new Paramount+ series also starring Sam Elliott, Hill shared with Deadline what it was about 1883 that made her finally agree to co-star alongside her husband. 

“Tim probably had said yes by this point, and look, I knew [showrunner Taylor Sheridan] was an amazing writer,” Hill said. “But going in to do something with my husband…we had been asked to do this a lot, to be on screen together. This needed to be something that could not be compared to anything else, period. It’s just not something I wanted to give away.”

Despite her initial hesitance, reading the script for the first couple of episodes convinced the country star. “Upon reading the first couple of episodes, wow. Holy cow, is this amazing,” Hill recalled. “So I said I was very interested. This sounds like it could be it.” As the episodes kept coming in, Hill admitted she had “never read anything like it,” especially in its portrayal of Elsa Dutton (Isabel May), the eldest daughter of James and Margaret. 

“As a woman, as a mom with three daughters, I just thought, ‘My God, this is extraordinary writing for anyone, but for a young woman, it’s really extraordinary,’” Hill shared. She also celebrated the performances of her co-stars: “And I just felt the characters were great. They were colorful. They were intense. There’s tragedy. There’s passion. There’s a little bit of humor, and Sam [Elliott] and LaMonica [Garrett] bring that in various ways,” the singer continued. 

Hill ended up being so enraptured by Sheridan’s scripts that she hadn’t really thought about what actually shooting the show would be like. “I pretty much underestimated it all, if you want my honest opinion,” she said. “I knew that I was not afraid of hard work. I don’t think anyone here is. Tim is not. We grew up with hard-working parents and that’s the only way we know.”

Sheridan did warn that shooting would be unlike anything they had ever done before, and that the work would be “really, really hard” to preserve its authenticity. “It was hard, physically and mentally challenging, but we were trained by the best of the best, the wranglers, the stuntmen and women,” Hills said. “Guns and armory, the set, the costuming, everything just put us there in that place, in that time. So it was harder than we thought including driving that wagon, but I learned to love it. And better on the wagon than I am on a horse.”