Lainey Wilson was chosen to play Abby on Yellowstone Season 5, but part way through filming, she almost walked away.
The cast and crew of the hit Paramount Network show — plus her father’s blessing — are what kept her working in Montana. Talking to the Dutton Rules podcast, Wilson tells Adison Haager that last summer she was “on top of the world professionally.”
“In the middle of filming of Yellowstone, my daddy was in the hospital. And he was in ICU,” she says. “He spent two months in ICU in Houston, fighting for his life — the doctors told us he’s not gonna make it, there’s a big chance he’s not gonna make it.”
The “Heart Like a Truck” singer has compartmentalized adversity before, but this was too much, until …
“He woke up just in time before I had really made up my mind and he said ‘I don’t care if it was my funeral, if you gotta job that needs to be done you’d better go do it and not come back until it’s done,'” Wilson reveals.
“I had to pull up my bootstraps.”
Once on set, she fell into the love and support of the cast and crew. Many of them, Wilson says, will be her friends for life.
“Every day we were on set they were wanting updates about, ‘How’s your daddy doing? We’re praying. We’re lifting him up,'” she shares. “Every single person just came up to me and was loving on me as much as they could. That’s truly, I think, what also gave me the strength to keep on pushing through.”