If you’ve ever watched an episode of Yellowstone with a dinner scene, you’re familiar with one of the show’s most well-loved and unsung heroes: Gator. The Dutton family cook is more than just a hired hand for Taylor Sheridan’s series; he’s a first-time actor with his role in the series, and a phenomenal chef in real life.
In fact, his cooking skills are what first brought him to Paramount’s Yellowstone universe, and the role on screen was an added bonus. Delish presented Dutton fans with a feature on chef Gabriel Guilbeau, and he explained that he was a little hesitant to be on-screen at first.
“I was shaking in my boots,” Gator told Delish of when Sheridan first wrote him into a scene. He’d never done any acting before, but he cruised through the set with an understated confidence that has carried him through many a Dutton dinner in the following seasons.
Fans know that it’s not easy to excel at attending a family dinner where Yellowstone is involved, as Beth Dutton uses the “family table” as a place to air out her grievances like it’s the sole purpose of the gathering space. Gator may work closely with the Duttons, but those awkward dinners are a lot — even for him. One of our favorite scenes with the unsung hero of the series was when he was trying to figure out how to cook for John’s guest, Summer. After all, he’s used to preparing meat-driven meals for those at the ranch.
Gator’s meals on-screen look delightful, and that’s because he’s the real deal. If you follow the chef on Instagram, you’ve seen not just how delicious his meals look, but how many he cooks. As the chef for Yellowstone and several other television shows, he’s not just cooking for a family or two here or there; he’s cooking for hundreds of people daily!
He notes that, when working on Yellowstone, he often cooks for over 300 people a day, and when it was time to feed the cast of 1883, that number was over 600. Gator says that cooking is part of who he is, and as long as the great people he works with need him, he’ll continue to feed them.
While he’s been able to experiment with several types of cooking and ingredients, he says there’s something special about the Cajun style of cooking, sharing its importance with readers and fans.
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“It’s important for the people that know how to do it to continue to do it, or else we could lose one of the finest cuisines America’s ever had.”
You can see Gator in season five of Yellowstone when it returns later this summer, and if you’re in the mood to laugh, check out some of the infamous Dutton family meals from previous seasons, you won’t want to miss them.
Gator grew up in Louisiana and was inspired by the Cajun cooking of his grandmother, who was renowned in South Louisiana for the food she made. His father had worked in several films produced in Los Angeles as a part of the craft services department.
After high school, Gator joined his father and became a chef in the entertainment industry. Before joining ‘Yellowstone,’ Gator had been a part of the craft services of several globally renowned productions like ‘22 Jump Street,’ ‘The Maze Runner,’ ‘American Horror Story,’ ‘Jurassic World,’ ‘Terminator Genisys,’ ‘Mindhunter,’ etc.
Here for Gator. Always. #YellowstoneTV @ParamountNet pic.twitter.com/uVBc3WW6SL
— Yellowstone (@Yellowstone) June 19, 2022
Gator became an actor overnight. “My first big scene was the grilled octopus scene […]. I think that was my first time on camera ever, baptism by fire, they just threw me in,” the chef-turned-actor added. The chef won the hearts of the cast and crew of the show by “Gatoring” his ancestor’s Cajun food or in his words, “the stuff that you can’t get anywhere else,” as per ‘Working the Yellowstone.’
In the sets of the show, Gator is usually seen near his favorite barbeque smoker, a piece of cooking equipment in which he once cooked fifteen 25-pound turkeys. In addition, Gator loves to use “a lot of butter.” Thus, it isn’t an accident that Summer Higgins witnesses the character Gator cooks potatoes with a big brick of butter in the sixth episode of the fifth season.
After working in the ‘Yellowstone’ sets as a chef for years, Gator had started to “read” the crew to cook dishes that would heighten the spirits of his fellow crew members. “If you feed people, it goes a long way in making ‘em happy. We would be done. We’d be done without Gator,” Ian Bohen, who plays Ryan, testified in the same behind-the-scenes special. “What Gator can do in the middle of nowhere, very, very limited resources, I still ate better than I’ve ever eaten in my life. Gator takes really, really, really good care of us,” Jefferson White, who plays Jimmy, joined Bohen to share the significance of the Cajun cook in the production of the show.