hristina Alexandra Voros couldn’t believe it. The director was sitting in the crowd at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City for the premiere of The Madison in March when a familiar voice called out her name. “Christina Voros directed every episode of [this] show,” the presenter announced, “I think you’ll see that she exceeded even my wildest expectations.”
That’s high praise from Sheridan, who, according to Voros, isn’t much of a “shoulder claps” kind of guy. But “there is a sense that the praise is the job,” she tells me now. “Taylor’s very funny. He’s incredibly loyal, he’s incredibly demanding, and he is very good at identifying talent in people that they might not even recognize in themselves.”
We’re speaking now, in May, because Voros is back in New York City to attend the premiere of yet another one of Sheridan’s series that she directed, Dutton Ranch. The Yellowstone spinoff starring Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser continues the story of the Western drama as the couple moves to Texas and fights to create a new life for themselves away from their family’s troubled legacy. The series marks the grand return to the Dutton-verse that fans have been waiting for, while welcoming acting legends Annette Bening and Ed Harris into the Yellowstone family. It’s also a culminating moment for Voros.
She started working with Sheridan as a camera operator on the first season of Yellowstone in 2018, before eventually working her way up to directing a pivotal episode for Reilly’s character, Beth Dutton. Since then, she’s hammered away in the Sheridan-verse and discovered her unique style of shooting from long distances—a technique that’s certainly aided by Montana’s breathtaking mountain ranges. Following The Madison and Dutton Ranch’s debuts, she’s ascended to basically the right-hand woman of the TV creator.
But when you guard the gates to Sheridan’s empire, you bear the same responsibility as the man who once told The Hollywood Reporter that he’s better off not speaking because “they’re scared of what I might say.” So, even though the role of Dutton Ranch showrunner is currently vacant—Chad Feehan (formely Lawman: Bass Reeves) departed the series before it aired over rumored disagreements on set—Voros offers up a humble and diplomatic answer to explain her rapidly climbing place in Sheridan’s grand design.
“If a [roadmap] exists, I don’t know what it is,” she tells me. “[But] I’m not saying no to anything because I would have told you everything I’ve done thus far was impossible.”
Much like Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in The Madison, Voros took Sheridan’s ethos to heart when she moved from New York City to Texas and learned to fall in love with the West. She married wrangler and West Texas-native Jason Owen—who works as an animal coordinator on many of Sheridan’s shows—before they moved to what she lovingly referred to as a “one-grocery-store town.” So, when Sheridan offered her full directing duties on The Madison, it felt like kismet.
“I almost fell out of my chair because I’d never imagined being given the opportunity to direct something that felt so uniquely similar to aspects of my own life,” Voros tells me. “I moved out West for love and not for grief, but it was still very personal to me—the way that you can reinvent yourself or are reinvented by changing your physical landscape in such a sprawling way.”
Now, like her new lead character on Dutton Ranch, Voros is learning to take in a bit of Beth’s confidence and believe in herself as a formative shaper of Sheridan’s stories. “You’re always just trying to confirm that his gamble on you was earned,” she says.
“Definitely in the last couple of years, I have shifted from more of a nervous desire to get it right to a confident one,” says Voros. “I don’t think any of us who work in his world ever necessarily feel like we’re special, or we deserve it, but there is a confidence that comes from looking at something impossible on paper, thinking There’s no way we can do this, doing it, getting another impossible script, saying there’s no way we can do it, and doing it again.”
Below, Voros shares more about what’s to come on Dutton Ranch, how she filmed the opening wildfire scene in the premiere, and how she helped envision the story for Beth and Rip moving forward.