Taylor Sheridan And Tyler Perry Had An Unexpected Collaboration In A 2021 Action Movie

If there's anyone as alarmingly prolific as Taylor Sheridan, it's surely Tyler Perry. Both have established impressive TV empires, with Perry having also established himself as a movie-making machine, amassing a reported $1 billion in the process. Sheridan, meanwhile, might not have quite the same expansive big screen output (though the films he's written and directed are some of the best of the last decade), but he's been especially busy building his TV kingdom, at the center of which sat the gargantuan hit "Yellowstone" before it ended with its controversial fifth season. As such, these two show business titans were surely destined to meet at some point, and it turns out they did in a 2021 action-thriller.

"Those Who Wish Me Dead" was directed by Sheridan, who also co-wrote it with fellow scribes Michael Koryta and Charles Leavitt. The film is based on Koryta's novel of the same name and stars Angelina Jolie as Montana smokejumper Hannah Faber. What's a smokejumper? Well, it's a firefighting specialist trained to handle wildfires by parachuting right into a blaze to handle the flames before they get out of hand. In "Those Who Wish Me Dead," a young boy named Connor (Finn Little) goes on the run after his father is murdered by father-son assassins Jack (Aidan Gillen) and Patrick (Nicholas Hoult). Hannah soon finds the youngster wandering in the wilderness and takes him back to her fire lookout tower. Unfortunately, the assassins want Connor dead and start a forest fire to distract the police, forcing Hannah to protect her new charge at all costs while dealing with a huge conflagration.

Though it wasn't Sheridan's finest film, "Those Who Wish Me Dead" was, as /Film's Chris Evangelista surmised in his review, refreshingly simple if forgettable. Where does Perry come in? Well, he only makes a cameo, but he does a decent enough job projecting a menacing aura as Arthur, a mysterious suited man who's involved in some dodgy criminal dealings.

Tyler Perry is only in "Those Who Wish Me Dead" for a quick cameo. But he plays an important role as Arthur, a well-dressed figure who's responsible for sending Jack and Patrick after Connor. When the hit-men fail to dispatch the youngster, Arthur arrives to advise the duo to hunt him down. "We promise absolutes, and unlikely is not an absolute," he tells Jack in a threatening tone that suggests Arthur is a big figure in the criminal underworld. Perhaps a fixer or other intermediary, the character is never given a full back story, but Perry certainly makes the most of his quick appearance, delivering a suitably chilling performance and exuding a quiet power with his terse line readings. For a man whose breakthrough performance came in 2005's "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," it's a testament to his diverse talent.

Speaking about the film during a 2022 interview, Perry praised the story, saying, "Only Taylor could have written something like this, it's really phenomenal," before going on to compliment Taylor Sheridan further. "I absolutely love Taylor's approach to filmmaking," he said. "Being the writer and the creator [...] he's going to be able to see it in a way that a director who didn't write it doesn't see it the same way [...] It's really great to get an opportunity to work with him." Asked where on earth he finds the time to play a small role in a Sheridan film, the multi-hyphenate added, "Listen, you say Taylor Sheridan, I read a great script, you say Angelina Jolie, I'll find the time to make that happen." Sadly, so far as Taylor Sheridan movies go, "Those Who Wish Me Dead" isn't at the top of the list, but it's also by no means a dud. Based on Perry and Sheridan's history, however, it seems as though either would have been glad to help the other out.

Evidently, Taylor Sheridan and Tyler Perry had been good friends for some time before they worked together on "Those Who Wish Me Dead." The "Yellowstone" creator told Variety in 2020 that Perry cold-called him after watching his movies. "I'm sure glad I did answer," said Sheridan, "because he's become a great friend and someone in this business who I trust." 

The pair's bond certainly makes sense, given their prolific output and ability to oversee multiple aspects of their productions. Like Perry, Sheridan also casts himself in his own projects, most notably in the role of Travis Wheeler on "Yellowstone." What's more, as Sheridan explained to Variety, Perry maintains fastidious control over his projects from his own movie studio, the sprawling Tyler Perry Studios, which sits on a 330-acre plot at the former Fort McPherson military base in Atlanta, Georgia. Meanwhile, Sheridan spent all five seasons of "Yellowstone" overseeing the massive production on a giant ranch. There, he had similar control over every aspect of production, even providing and training the horses for the hit neo-Western series. 

Whether we'll see more collaborations between the two remains unclear. But let's just hope Sheridan doesn't show up in one of Perry's streaming series; his most recent one, "Beauty in Black," might've topped the Netflix charts, but it was also dubbed "a disaster with one-dimensional characters and haphazard plotting" by The Guardian. In 2025, Perry was also sued for alleged sexual assault by actor Derek Dixon, who had appeared in several of Perry's projects, including "The Oval." As such, the writer/director will likely be more focused on dealing with that than ensuring he and Sheridan continue on-screen collaborations.