Dawn Olivieri has revealed why walking away from Hollywood made her a better actress.
The “Yellowstone” alum, 45, now lives on a 160-acre ranch outside Mena, Arkansas, where she founded the nonprofit Moon Mountain Sanctuary and Rescue in 2023. During an interview alongside her “Homestead: The Series” co-star Charles Esten, Olivieri explained that the career dry spell she suffered in Los Angeles forced her to confront the emptiness she felt chasing industry validation.
“I realized it wasn’t giving me what my dream of what it was supposed to give me,” Olivieri said.
“It wasn’t cooperating,” she continued. “I didn’t have offers, just like falling out of my phone. I went through a dry spell, and I was like, ‘Wow, so this is an illusion.'”
Olivieri said the experience stripped away what she called “the veil” of Hollywood’s promises. Rather than continue waiting for permission to live, she decided to build the life she had always imagined success would eventually buy her.
“I kind of saw through the veil and once I saw through veil — I realized in that moment, I have to make some decisions about my life that makes me happy — [it] isn’t always waiting by the phone, losing my power, waiting for someone to hire me,” she recalled. “I’m like, ‘Oh, what am I doing?'”
The actress left Los Angeles in 2022 and purchased the Arkansas property with, as she put it, “nothing.” She has been living in a camper on the land while expanding the ranch and sanctuary, which now rescues and rehabilitates hundreds of horses and other animals. During an August appearance on the “Let’s Talk Local” podcast, she described this stripped-down existence as the authentic foundation she had been missing.
“I just jumped ahead,” she explained. “I go, ‘If I did make all this money and was successful, what would I do with it?’ Well, I would move to the country and have horses and OK, well, I guess let me go do that. Let me, let me see what. And so I did that with nothing. Which wasn’t the dream part, but in actuality, it was what was always meant to happen because I moved toward my own authenticity.”
Esten, who portrays Cain Ross on the Angel Studios post-apocalyptic drama, endorsed Olivieri’s philosophy during the joint interview. He argued that desperation repels opportunity in entertainment and beyond.
“It’s not just Hollywood, it’s the whole world that — but especially Hollywood — can smell that desperation of, ‘I need this to get that,'” Esten said.
“The second you sort of don’t hold so tightly and you have sort of more philosophy of abundance and let it a little looser. Or another way is just give it up,” he continued. “I don’t mean give it up by quit doing it, but give up the need and the desperation on it. And then they finally go, ‘Hey, you want to come do a show?'”
“Yeah, literally, that’s what happened,” Olivieri replied.
The paradox, Olivieri noted, is that surrendering control over her career actually improved it. She began booking more work after leaving Los Angeles than she had while physically present in the industry’s center.
“I think in that moment, I became a better human being,” she said. “I became a better actress for sure. I started working way more than I did when I was in LA waiting for the job, waiting for the call.”
“And I moved to a land of no mirrors is what I called it,” Olivieri continued. “I went into a deep relationship with the core of my being versus what everything looked like, what I looked like.”
“And I would recommend that move to anybody,” she added.
Olivieri acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes had devastated work opportunities for many performers. Yet she had already committed to a different path, one where her identity was not contingent on her IMDb page.
“But I had a very clear decision that I was willing to give up this identity of being an actress,” she said. “And maybe if I had to sell farm-fresh eggs on the side of the road, I would do that just to keep my freedom.”
Her post-departure résumé contradicts the fear that leaving Los Angeles means leaving the business. After moving to Arkansas, Olivieri landed the role of Sarah Atwood, the corporate strategist who becomes entangled with Jamie Dutton on “Yellowstone” from 2022 to 2024. She previously played Claire Dutton in Taylor Sheridan’s 2021 “1883,” and currently has a recurring role as CIA officer Amber Whalen on “Lioness” with a recent guest spot on “The Madison.”
Olivieri credited Sheridan’s creative process for the quality of the roles she has found. She described him as a writer who operates without seeking external approval and who crafts unusually dimensional female characters.
“He doesn’t ask for permission to do anything,” she said. “He listens to his North, his guide, and he writes textured, powerful human beings, especially women, which I find is very, very rare.”
She once asked Sheridan directly how he achieved such insight into women’s interior lives. His answer, she recalled, was rooted in his upbringing.
“I went to him and I said, ‘How do you know how to do that?’ And he told me point blank, he said his mom was a strong woman,” she remembered. “So he had a very, very, very close example of how strong women move and what they do and how they think and the way that they talk.”
Olivieri and Esten also addressed the broader cultural shift toward homesteading, self-sufficiency, and distancing from urban centers. Olivieri framed this trend as a response to systemic toxicity driven by profit motives.
“People are thinking about it because everything else is becoming toxic in all truth,” she said. “Our food system has gone toxic because of profit. Our way of life in a city has become toxic because of overpopulation potentially or, again, I really think the root of it is profit and money and commerce.”
“In this state of government, being open and available is just a nicer experience,” she added. “It is for me anyway.”
Esten distinguished between Olivieri’s open, rescue-oriented homesteading and the fear-based survivalism their series dramatizes. “Homestead: The Series,” which premiered its second season on Nov. 3, follows inhabitants of a fortified Rocky Mountain compound after a nuclear attack on Los Angeles. Olivieri plays Jenna Ross, thrust into leadership after her husband’s death, while Esten’s Cain Ross advocates a harder line on survival.
“Dawn’s homesteading that I’ve noticed is beautiful,” Esten said. “Our version of homestead is very extraordinary necessity, fear-based. Plant these fences and Dawn’s is the opposite of that. Dawn’s very open and welcoming and saving animals that need it and welcoming other folks on.”
The second season of “Homestead: The Series” continues streaming on Angel with new episodes released weekly on Tuesdays.