Tim McGraw Recalls Having To Tell Faith Hill To Stop Shaving After Phone Call With Taylor Sheridan: “You Should’ve Seen Her Face”

Now I’m not sure this was in the contract…

Faith Hill and Tim McGraw were the stars of Taylor Sheridan’s prequel to the hit series Yellowstone, 1883, which went for one season and consisted of 10 episodes as the earliest Dutton settlers fought their way West and eventually settled on the modern-day Dutton Ranch.

Of course, like all of writer and show-runner Sheridan’s shows, it’s extremely authentic, and tons of time, detail and research goes into crafting each script, which McGraw talked about at-length in an interview with Tracy Lawrence on his TL’s Road House podcast.

He told Lawrence that Sheridan is heavily involved in all of it and really does write every script, and that was a huge part of the reason he and Faith signed onto the show to begin with. They found the writing “poetic,” and they knew they couldn’t turn it down. Like all the other shows set in the west, Tim and Faith headed to cowboy camp for two weeks, and right before they started filming, the country power couple attended their nephew’s wedding in Florida.

But while at the reception, McGraw got a phone call from Sheridan, and because they were so close to starting, he answered it. But it wasn’t exactly about him… Sheridan was calling because one of them had to tell Faith she was going to have to stop shaving her legs and underarms so they could look, um, natural in time to start filming:

“He does a ton of research, and even when we were doing ‘1883,’ the amount of research and detail that he had about what went on during that time… I remember, we were at my nephew’s wedding in Florida, right before we were supposed to start shooting, about a month out…

And I got a phone call sitting at the reception dinner, and so I answer, and I said, ‘Hey, what’s up Taylor?’ And he said, ‘Hey, do you wanna this or do you want me to do this? But you’ve gotta tell Faith that she’s gotta stop shaving her legs and her underarms.’ And I went, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, because they didn’t shave their underarms during that time. They didn’t shave them until the 1920’s.’

So we’re at a wedding, and I’m sitting there right next to Faith, and I said, ‘Taylor just called and said you have to  stop shaving your underarms.’ You should’ve seen her face.”

I can only imagine… that’s some serious method acting, and I’m not sure I could do it, so good on Faith because that’s honestly quite a sacrifice in my humble opinion.

But Tim also wanted to know if he needed to stop shaving his chest, because he had to do it to keep from “looking like a gorilla,” though he didn’t have to follow the same protocol as his wife:

“I think they said like the 1920’s is when they started doing that. Then I asked him, I said, ‘Well, you know, I shave my chest because I look like a gorilla. And if I don’t shave my chest, it pops out through my T-shirt and all that kinda stuff.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s your choice, you don’t have to worry about that.’  Faith goes, ‘Well, what the f***?'”

I guess it’s one of those “don’t shoot the messenger” things, but I think Tim is pretty brave for telling her that himself…

He also talked about going to cowboy camp and how Faith actually had to learn to drive an authentic wagon from back then, which was pretty dangerous because they filmed everything for real, on location, and apparently she got the hang of it by the end of the show:

“It was so good, and we spent two weeks at cowboy camp, like I said, I grew up riding, so for me it just Heaven. But the hardest part was Faith learning to drive the wagon. Because they were all original, authentic wagons. They were dangerous.

You’re sitting up high, and we were crossing some serious rivers. I mean, it was pretty bad***, and she got to where she could really back that wagon up into anywhere. She got good at it.”

What a wild, really dang cool thing to know how to do… there’s probably few, if any, modern American women who can say they really know how to drive an authentic wagon form that time period.

They obviously had tons of great on-screen chemistry since they’re a real life married couple too, and while Tim thinks it was a one-off season and there won’t be any more 1883, it was really cool to see them act together and I hope they’ll at least act together in some capacity on another show or movie someday.

You can watch the full podcast here: