Did You Know ‘Yellowstone’ Star Piper Perabo Is Married to a Show Insider?

Piper Perabo's character is currently engaged in an unlikely romance with Dutton family patriarch John Dutton (Kevin Costner) on Yellowstone, but in real life, Perabo is married to an insider who wields quite a bit of power on the show.

Perabo has been married to director Stephen Kay since 2014. According to Us Weekly, they met while they were both working on the TV series Covert Affairs, in which she played the lead role of Annie Walker. Kay was the show's director and executive producer.

They announced their engagement in 2013, and Perabo and Kay married in 2014.

Kay began his career as an actor before graduating to directing, and he and Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan met when both previously worked on Sons of Anarchy. Kay has directed 15 episodes of Yellowstone since Season 2, and it was actually a conversation during a dinner at Sheridan's house that led to Perabo's casting as activist Summer Higgins on the show.

Perabo is a real-life activist, and that led to Sheridan writing the role specifically for her.

"I had a dinner with Taylor Sheridan, who writes Yellowstone, and his family, and it was after I had been part of a big protest," Perabo told Taste of Country in an interview to promote Season 4 of the runaway hit show. "It came up at dinner. I had gotten arrested for civil disobedience at this protest, and he was really interested in that, and we started talking about ... he kinda wanted to know all the nuts and bolts, and exactly how it works. That's the kind of storyteller he is. He gets interested in something and just keeps digging and digging and digging."

That wasn't the end of it.

"About six months later, he called and said he'd written this part," she said, adding that it's a dream role because she was already a Yellowstone fan.

Yellowstone became even more of a family project for Perabo and Kay during the first half of Season 5, when Kay's daughter from a previous relationship, Lilli Kay — Perabo's stepdaughter — took a role as Clara Brewer, John Dutton's assistant.

"I’ve sort of been on the edges of it. Lucky for me, I was a fan and already had family who was working on the show," Kay tells Deadline. "I had heard such amazing things from them. And then a part came along that I might be right for. Taylor Sheridan had seen my work. I had known him for a while and he knew that I could ride, so he threw me in the mix."

She says the job was "literally a dream come true. The number of days that I came home from work crying over how amazing it was to hang out with both Dad and Piper at work … I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is my dream.’ It was so lame of me, but also so much fun."

As part of Taste of Country's comprehensive coverage of all things Yellowstone, check out more of our Dutton Rules podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.