Taylor Sheridan

Career

Sheridan started his career in acting, appearing in small films and in recurring roles in TV shows such as Veronica Mars, Walker, Texas Ranger and most notably, as David Hale in Sons of Anarchy.

Sheridan made the transition into screenwriting after he turned 40. His first feature was the Denis Villeneuve-directed Sicario, which Sheridan has said was his first script he ever wrote. Sicario revolves around Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), an FBI agent who is enlisted to a government task force to bring down the leader of a powerful and brutal Mexican drug cartel. It also starred Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro. The film received critical acclaim, with a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and received a number of nominations, including a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Sheridan.

Sheridan wrote Comancheria after Sicario. Comancheria sold first but was stuck in development for quite a few years, appearing on the Black List in 2012. It was later retitled Hell or High Water and was released in August 2016, starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster, and again received critical acclaim. For his screenplay, Sheridan received a large amount of awards attention, earning BAFTA, Golden Globe Award, and Academy Award nominations.

Sheridan has made his directorial debut with Wind River, starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen, the script for which he also penned, set to premiere at Sundance Film Festival in January 2017. The plot follows an FBI agent (Olsen), who teams with a veteran game tracker (Renner) to investigate a murder that occurred on a Native American reservation. Prior to its premiere, The Weinstein Company, who acquired the distribution rights during the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, dropped the film. However, the company later finalized its deal to distribute the film.

On September 15, 2016, Deadline reported that Sheridan has been set by Sony Pictures and Escape Artists to script the American remake of the Matthias Schoenaerts starrer Disorder, a 2015 French film directed by Alice Winocour. Escape Artists' Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, Steve Tisch and Tony Shaw will produce the remake and David Beaubaire is overseeing it for the studio. No director has been set yet.

Style

As an ex-actor, Sheridan has explained that the amount of expositional dialogue he read for television caused him to form an "allergy to exposition" in his writing. He has also said that he looks for "absurdly simple" plots in order to focus solely on character.

He is known for toying with the form and structure of a screenplay in his work. In Sicario, Sheridan incorporated a "five-act structure and a five-act structure within that." He believes in the intelligence of the audience, and uses the structure and context of his stories as a way to subvert expectations: "I look at each movie as, ‘How am I breaking the rules this time?’"

Personal life

Sheridan grew up on a ranch in Cranfills Gap, TX. His family lived minimally, not having a stereo system in their house; his parents would sit in their station wagon, which had an 8-track player, listening to music to pass the time. Had they not lost the property in the early 90s, Sheridan said "I would still be living there."

After failing out of Texas State University, a talent scout offered Sheridan the chance to go to Los Angeles and pursue an acting career.