This post contains spoilers for “Yellowstone,” including season 5.

“Yellowstone” is full of real gut-punch moments. The series kicked off with a shocking death when Lee Dutton met his fate in the premiere episode. That very much set the tone for the show moving forward, which at times felt like a really well-shot soap opera and less like a premium drama. That isn’t to knock Taylor Sheridan’s hugely-popular neo-Western; “Yellowstone” has managed to maintain its appeal in part due to such shocking developments making the series unmissable — at least for dads. Sam Elliot might have trashed “Yellowstone” as a result of its soapy tendencies, but he also starred in one of its spin-offs, so he can’t hate it that much.

This continued right up until the show’s fifth season, with season 5 part B opening with the controversial death of Dutton family patriarch John Dutton (Kevin Costner). Perhaps the most contentious moment in the history of “Yellowstone,” the passing of John Dutton stemmed from some behind-the-scenes drama concerning Costner’s exit from the show, proving that “Yellowstone” is a tumultuous production both in front of and behind the camera.

For Wes Bentley, who plays John and Evelyn Dutton’s (Gretchen Mol) adopted son Jamie, there were plenty of intense moments throughout the series’ five seasons. Jamie was in a feud of sorts with his adoptive family starting at the very beginning of the show and quickly found himself caught up in plenty of inter-family backstabbing and malicious machinations as a result. But one quietly devastating moment proved more difficult for Bentley to pull off than any other.

In season 3, Jamie learns that he was actually adopted by John and Evelyn after his real father killed his own mother when Jamie was just a baby. His birth parents were drug addicts, and Jamie’s father, Garrett Randall (Wes Patton), claimed to have murdered his wife, Phyllis, after discovering her in bed with another man while an infant Jamie, then named Michael Randall, lay hungry. While this story was never confirmed, it showed that Jamie had begun his life at the center of tumult and tragedy — two things that would follow him throughout his adult existence.

For the first three seasons of “Yellowstone,” Jamie has no idea of his tragic origin, having never been told that he was adopted — though he had always struggled to feel like part of the Dutton family. In season 3, episode 7, “The Beating,” however, he is asked to retrieve his birth certificate to be officially sworn in as Montana’s Attorney General. When he receives it, he discovers his original name and birth parents’ names on the document and realizes he’s not a true Dutton.

In a behind-the-scenes featurette for the episode, Bently — who has previously spoken about the sadness of Jamie Dutton staying with him off-screen — described the difficulty of performing this scene, saying, “I can’t even describe all the things that came up in doing the scene where he finds out who he is. It was like a strange combination of ‘Aha’ and ‘Oh no’ and ‘Oh my god.'” But the actor would later expand on just how hard it was for him to convey Jamie’s emotions in this moment. In fact, he claimed it was the most challenging scene to perform in his entire “Yellowstone” tenure.

After discovering the truth about his adoption, Jamie’s life would become even more turbulent than it had been, with the adopted Dutton son breaking away from his family and even reconnecting with his birth father, Garrett. That storyline itself would have a tragic climax when Jamie shot Garrett and disposed of his body in the Duttons’ “Train Station” dumping ground. Even then, his sister Beth (Kelly Reilly, who’s now set to headline a “Yellowstone” spin-off with Cole Hauser) tailed him to the location and took photos of Jamie with the body, leading to yet more family drama.

But it seems shooting all of this was easier for Wes Bentley than the single moment his character discovered he was adopted. Speaking to US Magazine in 2024, the actor described why the scene with the birth certificate was so challenging:

“It’s not like the other scenes, where it’s all emotional and yelling and screaming. It’s just real simple, like [a] gut punch and also an answer to a question he’s always had but didn’t know he had. That day playing [Jamie] felt really ethereal — I was really in a head-y, glossy state, just trying to fathom what that must be [like].”

Bentley went on to say that this single moment “really switched something to me as well, going forward.” Now that “Yellowstone” has wrapped up with the second part of its fifth and final season, in which Jamie dies, it will be interesting to know whether any scene from this tempestuous final season has matched the challenge of the character’s earlier discovery.

“Yellowstone” is currently streaming on Peacock.