Kevin Costner's New 8-Part Prime Video Series "Stole" From Iconic Westerns

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Kevin Costner as Wyatt looking intensely at something in Wyatt Earp

Published Feb 18, 2026, 10:00 AM EST

The creative team behind Kevin Costner's Western return looked to some of the genre's most iconic titles for their new series.

Reuniting the Oscar winner with his Hatfields and McCoys collaborators Darrell Fetty and Leslie Greif, Costner is executive producing The Gray House alongside fellow Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, marking his first Western series after Yellowstone. The eight-part series chronicles the true story of four Southern women who repurposed an underground railroad during the Civil War into a spy network for the Union.

Ahead of its Prime Video premiere on February 26, ScreenRant's Liam Crowley interviewed Leslie Greif and Lori McCreary to discuss The Gray House. When asked about the show's key Western genre influences, the writer began by recalling his previous experience with the show's "fabulous" director, Rolland Joffé, on the 2015 miniseries Texas Rising, in which the pair "did two weekends of marathons" with their "famous, favorite Westerns," and films set in Civil War times.

Joking that "genius steals," to which McCreary laughed as she corrected him that it was "an homage" to other genre classics, Greif further praised Joffé for being a filmmaker who "shoots the story" rather than "talking heads":

Leslie Greif: We stole a lot to be able to put it together. [Chuckles] So many people today, they follow the dialogue. Roland directs actors into the camera lens. He doesn't find the actor. He has the actor find the camera, and that's what gives us the scope and the magnificence of this piece. And that's why I think it looks so different.

When it came to making Texas Rising, it certainly made sense for Greif and Joffé to find themselves looking back at numerous Western classics. The 2015 miniseries was about one of the more infamous eras of American history, that being the fall of the Alamo, albeit took a different approach by exploring the aftermath. Given said battle has been adapted into a variety of film and TV shows, including the self-named John Wayne-directed 1960 movie and Billy Bob Thornton-led 2004 film.

However, unlike their work on Texas Rising, The Gray House sees Greif and Joffé exploring entirely new territory on screen. The story of the four abolitionist women, played by The Institute's Mary-Louise Parker, Shadow and Bone's Daisy Head, Westworld's Hannah James and Kindred's Amethyst Davis, has not yet been adapted for the screen. As such, the co-writer and director could very well be pulling from both the Western and spy genres for the series.

Though Greif didn't specify which films they "stole" from for the series, he and McCreary did offer to ScreenRant a few titles to watch as preparation for The Gray House, the first of which being Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales, which he described the show as being a spiritual prequel to. McCreary also pointed to the Freeman-starring classic Glory, feeling that it similarly was a true story unexplored prior to the 1989 film, and highlighted the "moral cost of war."

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Given Costner was also deeply involved in The Gray House's production, having meetings with Greif, McCreary, Fetty and co-writer John Sayles, it also shows the sheer range of Western titles the show can pull from. Costner has been in everything from the more comedic Silverado to the deeply dramatic Dances with Wolves and Open Range, and if his ideas extended to Joffé's approach to directing the eight-part series, the range of projects the team "stole" from may be bigger than one might expect.

The Gray House begins streaming on Prime Video on February 26.