“Sometimes I’d go to Ojai, just somewhere where I could safely sleep. I did that for six months.”

Taylor Sheridan says he was ‘homeless twice’ and lived in his car before career success

“Sometimes I’d go to Ojai, just somewhere where I could safely sleep. I did that for six months.”

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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August 20, 2026 2:25 p.m. ET

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Taylor Sheridan in New York City on June 30, 2026. Credit:

Cindy Ord/Getty

- Taylor Sheridan said he was “homeless twice” during his early career as a struggling actor.

- “I lived in my car…I did that for six months,” he added.

- The *Yellowstone* creator noted that he “chose to sleep in my car” instead of “going to go get a full time job.”

Taylor Sheridan hasn’t always been a titanic TV mogul.

The *Yellowstone* creator and super-producer is one of the most prominent creative forces in American entertainment, but he began his career as a struggling character actor.

“I was homeless twice,” Sheridan said of his early acting career during an interview with *Town & Country*. “I lived in my car. Sometimes I’d go to Ojai, just somewhere where I could safely sleep. I did that for six months.”

Sheridan recognizes that he chose the harder path to follow his artistic ambitions. “I could have decided at any point, ‘I’m going to go get a full-time job and I’m going to give up this dream,’” he told the outlet. “And I chose to sleep in my car over that.”

Taylor Sheridan in ‘Sons of Anarchy’.

Sheridan eventually found a stable gig as a key recurring player on *Sons of Anarchy*, but he exited the show after three seasons in 2010. Though he didn’t land much acting work in the years that followed, he eventually sold a spec script for *Hell or High Water*, which marked the beginning of his next chapter as both a screenwriter and a property owner.

“When I sold that first screenplay, I bought a little house on an acre on a river in Wyoming,” he explained. “We moved there, and I wrote a check for it. Then, as I would start to have more success, I would buy a little bit more land beside it and get a couple horses. I’m still so averse to having to ever owe anybody anything.”

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The screenwriter doesn’t look back fondly on his time in Los Angeles, as he said that his prison drama series *Mayor of Kingstown* bears some similarity to his emotional state in the city of angels. “Here’s a guy in a place that he hates, attempting to hold this place together instead of leaving,” he explained. “That, to me, was pretty autobiographical, because there I was stuck in L.A. That’s what that was.”

Sheridan now owns multiple ranches in Texas, including 6666 Ranch — an opportunity he fell into when he befriended its former owner while scouting locations for *Yellowstone*. After the previous owner’s death, the trustees turned to Sheridan.

Taylor Sheridan in Las Vegas on Dec. 11, 2021.

Ethan Miller/Getty

“They said, ‘Do you want to pony up about 350 million bucks and take this place over?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m $330 million short,’” he remembered. “So I went and made an overall deal with Paramount to raise the money, brought in some investors, and then I bought it.”

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Sheridan also said that he got involved with real-life cattle ranching after he saw CNN call *Yellowstone*‘s HQ “the most famous ranch in America” despite being a fictional location. “My heart sank, because it’s not a real ranch, right?” he explained. “I had created a fad. The problem with fads is they end. But ranching is a real thing.”

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Source: “AOL Actors”