Lainey Wilson knows when it’s love and when it’s tough — and she also knows how to roll with the punches. In the midst of filming season 5 of Paramount’s hit show Yellowstone as the musician Abby last July, the “Heart Like a Truck” singer, 31, was shaken when her father, Brian, was hospitalized following an infection and a stroke. He required nine different surgeries, including the removal of his left eye.
“It was really, really bad,” Wilson tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue, on newsstands Friday. “All the doctors had told us, ‘This is not looking good.’ I remember they had hired a few hundred extras to be on-set, and I was supposed to be there the next day, and I was in Houston with my daddy, and I just didn’t wanna go.”
When she thought her dad was sleeping, Wilson — who is the cover star of StyleWatch’s Summer Edition — talked about the situation during a phone call in his hospital room. She soon found out he was eavesdropping.
“He opened his eyes and said, ‘Did I hear that you’re not going out to film Yellowstone?’ I said, ‘Daddy, I can’t leave you.’ He said, ‘You better go, and you better not come back until the job is done,’” she says. “That is the girl that he raised. So I headed that way and did it. It’s that mentality right there that I feel has gotten me to this place.”
Wilson went ahead with filming, and by November 2022, she was able to bring her dad along with her to the Country Music Association Awards, where she won new artist of the year and best female vocalist.
“It was a miracle,” she says, growing emotional. “He’s not supposed to be here, and he is. When he was a little boy, he used to roll a picnic table out on the side of the highway and stand on top of it with his guitar and pretend that he was Glen Campbell for the cars passing by. So, he’s getting to live vicariously through me, and I’m so glad and so thankful that he is around to see the things that are happening right now. He’s real proud.”
As for her fate on the second half of the fifth season of Yellowstone (expected to premiere in November), Wilson — whose songs were featured on the show in 2019, before she joined the cast in an acting role — says even she is in the dark.
“I have realized that the TV world is even crazier than the music world,” she says. “I’m like, creator ‘Taylor Sheridan, you gotta let me know what’s going on, bro.’ I’m excited to see what happens. There’s no doubt the rest of season 5 is gonna be money.”