Kurt Russell is 75 years old and has been with Goldie Hawn for more than four decades.
When he sat down to read the scripts for The Madison, a new six-episode drama now streaming on Paramount+, he could not get through them without stopping.
The reason, he explained in interviews with The National and Men’s Health, was that the show’s central love story, between a couple separated by deathm reflected conversations he and Hawn have actually had.
“I had a hard time getting through the scripts,” Russell said. “They just kept hitting me really hard, and I felt that that was a big part of this show’s potential, ability to grab an audience. Its writing was so authentic.”
The Madison premiered on March 14, 2026, and reached 8 million global streaming views in its first ten days, the biggest series launch of creator Taylor Sheridan’s career, which includes Yellowstone, 1883, 1923, Landman, Tulsa King, and Lioness.
Season 2 has already been filmed and is awaiting a release date.
What Is Kurt Russell’s New Show?
The Madison is not part of the Yellowstone universe, despite Sheridan’s involvement and a Montana setting.
Paramount+ originally positioned it as connected to that franchise, then announced it as a standalone, which, based on everything about it, it is. Sheridan himself has described it as his most intimate work.
Preston Clyburn, a wealthy New York finance professional played by Russell, dies in a plane crash in the opening episode.
His death sends his widow Stacy, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and their extended family from Manhattan to the Madison River valley of central Montana, where Preston’s brother Paul (Matthew Fox) has a ranch that the rest of the family has never visited.
The six episodes follow Stacy and her daughters Abigail (Beau Garrett) and Paige (Elle Chapman) processing grief, confronting each other, and slowly discovering, as Stacy does, how much she had in Preston that she did not fully see while she had it.
Russell appears in every episode through flashback sequences despite his character dying in the first.
The emotional architecture of the show is built around what Preston and Stacy had, a marriage so genuinely good that its loss is the whole catastrophe.
“Some of the conversations that Preston and Stacy have, I’ve had,” Russell told Men’s Health. He continued:
“Goldie and I have had very similar conversations. Their relationship, it’s the kind of relationship you almost never see anymore. It’s a truly loving relationship. It’s not like there’s another shoe to drop. That’s what makes it so difficult for Michelle’s character when she loses her husband. She’s realizing how much more they could have had that they didn’t have because of something she didn’t do.”
The Theme Of Regret
The show’s emotional core is not just loss but the specific kind of regret that comes from not fully appreciating something while it existed.
Stacy does not discover that Preston was secretly terrible, she discovers that he was genuinely wonderful and that she had not entirely let herself see that.
For Russell, at 75, that resonated in a personal way he did not entirely anticipate.
“I think a lot of people relate to that kind of regret,” he told Men’s Health. “As you get older and you’ve only got so much time left, that doubles things up in terms of looking at what you’ve done in your life so far and what you want to do with the rest of your life.”
He and Hawn have been together since 1983, when their relationship began during the filming of Swing Shift.
They first met much earlier in 1966, on the set of The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, when Russell was 16 and Hawn was 21.
Their romantic connection came later, deepening on Swing Shift and becoming publicly established with the 1987 comedy Overboard.
They have never married. They have been together for more than 40 years. Hawn is 80. Russell is 75.
Their blended family includes Russell’s son Boston, Hawn’s children Oliver Hudson and Kate Hudson, and their son Wyatt Russell, who is himself now an actor.
Why The Show Almost Didn’t Get Made
The production story behind The Madison is unusual. When Sheridan offered Russell the role of Preston, Russell wanted to do it, but was committed to filming Season 2 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Apple TV+ on an overlapping schedule.
He almost turned the offer down.
Pfeiffer and Sheridan were not prepared to accept that. They devised a workaround and pitched it to Paramount+ executives. They would request an early renewal for Season 2 of The Madison before Season 1 had even aired.
Russell would then film all of his Season 1 scenes, the flashback sequences that appear throughout the six episodes, during Season 2 production, a year later, in September 2025.
Matthew Fox, whose character Paul appears in scenes with Preston, filmed all of those scenes during the same Season 2 production window.
Pfeiffer, meanwhile, filmed the entirety of Season 1 without Russell physically present.
She played Stacy opposite an absent husband, constructing her performance around a relationship the audience needed to believe was real and that she needed to feel without a scene partner.
“I was not happy about that,” she said with a laugh in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, adding that because she already knew Russell personally, it was at least possible to conjure him in her imagination. “Taylor was insisting it was going to happen, so I just decided in my head, ‘Ok, it’s Kurt.'”
The gamble paid out. The Madison reached 8 million views in ten days. Russell says Season 2 is better.
“You see them together a lot,” he said of Preston and Stacy’s expanded presence through flashbacks in the second season.
Who Is Goldie Hawn?
Goldie Hawn was born November 21, 1945, in Washington, D.C. She is 80 years old.
She broke through as a comedic actress in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In in the late 1960s and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Cactus Flower in 1970.
Her film career spans Private Benjamin, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, Overboard, Bird on a Wire, Death Becomes Her, The First Wives Club, and many others.
She is the mother of actors Oliver Hudson and Kate Hudson (with her first husband, musician Bill Hudson) and Wyatt Russell (with Kurt Russell).
She has been largely out of the public eye in recent years, which makes every reference to her and Russell’s enduring relationship a recurring point of genuine audience interest.
Who Is Kurt Russell?
Kurt Russell was born March 17, 1951, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is 75.
He began as a Disney child actor, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, The Strongest Man in the World, and built one of the more durable careers in Hollywood over the following five decades, ranging from Escape from New York and The Thing to Silkwood, Tequila Sunrise, Tombstone, Vanilla Sky, Miracle, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
He has never won a competitive Oscar and has been nominated for a Golden Globe once. The Madison, and the response to it, may change that calculus.
He and Pfeiffer last worked together 37 years ago on Tequila Sunrise (1988). The Madison is their reunion.
