Luke Grimes didn’t plan on returning to the Yellowstone universe—at least, not without a good reason.

The 41-year-old actor, best known for playing Kayce Dutton across five seasons of Taylor Sheridan’s modern Western epic, says he was fully prepared to hang up his cowboy hat after the series ended last fall.

But as he tells People, saying goodbye to Yellowstone wasn’t as easy as he expected.

Dave Annable, Wes Bentley, Luke Grimes, and Kevin Costner ride horses in Yellowstone.

“It was seven years of playing a person that I’ll never see again, except for having his hat and jacket in my closet,” Grimes said of the Season 5 finale. “To try to put that show away, it was hard. It was really hard, and I know this is going to sound weird, but it was sort of emotional. It was like losing a family in a way.”

That emotion ran deeper than he anticipated. Grimes recalls the last day of filming as the definitive end of his time as Kayce: “On the last day of shooting, I thought it was my last day as Kayce. It was over to me.”

What Is ‘Y: Marshals’ About?

What Did Luke Grimes Say About Yellowstone Ending? Kayce Dutton's Future

Fast forward a few months and everything changed. In May, CBS announced Y: Marshals, a spin-off series centered around Kayce Dutton, with Grimes back in the saddle. But he wasn’t quick to say yes.

“I thought it was the end of the road, which would’ve been fine were it the case,” he said. “Kayce sort of gets what he has been looking for—his dream life.”

That quiet ending posed a problem. Where could a spin-off go if the character had already found peace with his family and had finally come to accept his place in the world?

“If it was just like, ‘well, he’s happy’ — we’re just going to watch him be happy? That’s not very cool. We definitely wanted to make sure to give it a real story and make it interesting and make it believable.

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The idea that was pitched to me is very, very good and very interesting,” he teased. “It really roped me in and I think it will rope the audience in as well.”

In Yellowstone’s final episodes, Kayce sold the Dutton land to Chief Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham) and seemed to finally find his center. But Y: Marshals promises to thrust him into a new world—one that brings new challenges, a new context, and, yes, some new (and old) faces.