Ash Santos as Andrea and Arielle Kebbel as Belle in MARSHALS – Season 1 | “On Thing Ice” | ©2025 CBS/Zack Dilgard

MARSHALS, the first broadcast spin-off of Paramount+’s YELLOWSTONE (which has multiple streaming spin-offs, including the new DUTTON RANCH), has proved a big hit for CBS in its first season on Sunday nights. Created by Spencer Hudnut & Taylor Sheridan (Sheridan co-created the original YELLOWSTONE with John Linson and is co-creator on all of the other YELLOWSTONE-verse shows), MARSHALS was renewed for a second season well ahead of its first-season finale, which airs May 24, and will thereafter be available with all previous episodes on demand and on Paramount+.

MARSHALS has Luke Grimes reprising his YELLOWSTONE role as Kayce Dutton, whose ex-Navy SEAL background helps him fit into the U.S. Marshals Service in his native rural Montana.

Ash Santos plays one of Kayce’s fellow marshals, transplanted Washington, D.C. resident Andrea Cruz.

Like Andrea, Santos is a native East Coaster, although she hails from New York. Some of her other films and television credits include THIRST, AMERICAN HORROR STORY, NIGHT TEETH, TRUE STORY, MIKE, MAYOR OF KINGSTOWN, and THE ROUGHNECK.

On an exclusive Zoom call with Assignment X, Santos talks about her new role.

For starters, what can Santos tell us about Andrea Cruz?

“She’s no-holds-barred, from New York, she’s incredibly tough, she’s seen the worst of society. So, she’s definitely the teammate that will never hold her tongue and say what everyone else is thinking. But then we also start getting her vulnerability as the season goes on. There’s a softness to her that I think they didn’t expect to see. So, she’s very intriguing to me.

“She’s heavily trained in interrogation tactics. And she went through something that we’ll later learn that has kind of forced her to come to Montana and be in Yellowstone. She doesn’t want to be here, she’s very much a fish out of water. Her first time even seeing a horse up close is in the pilot, and she doesn’t know how to ride them.”

Andrea has what Santos calls “a bit of a New York affectation. Our first director, Greg Yaitanes worked with me on that, because he wanted to get it to a place where it wasn’t overt, just subtle enough, because he wanted when she speaks for it to sound like she is not from [Montana]. And so, that part was fun for me, because I just get to channel all my cousins that still live in the Bronx,” she laughs.

Santos reveals that, although MARSHALS is set in and around Yellowstone in Montana, the series is actually shot in Park City, Utah. Coincidentally, Santos has been living in Utah since 2011.

“So, when I got the audition for this, and I went to Dallas to test for it, the showrunner, Spencer Hudnut, and I were joking later on, because he was like, ‘We had to fly you all the way to Texas just to tell you that you’re going to be working in Utah,’” Santos laughs. “So, it’s been the best job ever.”

Was Santos a YELLOWSTONE fan prior to becoming involved with MARSHALS?

“I was, yes, very much. So, I got really excited when I booked this, because I was such a fan of the show, and I have seen every season, so getting to join the world was just very much almost like an out-of-body experience.”

Did Santos have an opinion about MARSHALS lead Grimes before doing scenes with him?

“I loved his work. I’ve known about him since TRUE BLOOD, and I didn’t expect him to be as sweet as he is. He’s just like a mushy-gushy bear. And he’s also hilarious. He makes me laugh all the time. So, having him as Number One on the call sheet has been a huge example to me, because he is so incredibly kind to every single person that he speaks to, and he is never in a bad mood. He could be overworked and under-slept, and he will still show up and smile and be so sweet to everybody. So, I knew of his work before, but I was surprised with what a class act he is.”

Andrea Cruz in MARSHALS is Santos’s first time playing a character in law enforcement, although “I grew up with a father who was an NYPD SVU detective. So, I’m very familiar with law enforcement, but I was very unfamiliar with marshals and their capacity. And so, that was probably the most intriguing thing to me, was because I’ve never really seen that portrayed on television, and they do even more than what I thought.”

The job of a marshal, Santos observes, “encompasses more than just a regular cop.” For example, “FBI are in suits and ties, and they do investigations. Marshals are very much boots on the ground, very gritty. They can spend hours staking out someone’s house, and then, the second they see them, they can end up on the street chasing this person down and tackling them and arresting them. So, there was so much physicality that had to come to the role that I wasn’t aware of [before], but then weirdly found that that was one of the things that I was the best with, so it’s been a lot of fun.”

Have the producers shared with Santos where Andrea is likely to go as a character?

“Yeah. Spencer Hudnut, the showrunner, sat down with me before we started shooting and he gave me the whole gist of Andrea’s storyline as the seasons go on, and I was like, ‘Oh! Way more than what I thought – this is amazing!’ So, I think, or at least I hope, audiences will fall in love with her the same way that I fell in love with her. Because with her, what you [first] see is not what you get.”

As for the storylines on MARSHALS, “Our show deals heavily with Montana and the issues that actually face Montana, especially on the Native American reservations. You have a high percentage of young girls that go missing, and we definitely deal with that as a heavy topic. So, we very much tapped into the current things that are happening in Montana and near actual Yellowstone, which I really love.”

The role of Andrea required “a lot of training. Most Taylor Sheridan shows start with cowboy camp. I already had horseback riding experience. So, we all had to get signed off on with our horses.

“Then we had to do firearms training. We have a former Navy SEAL who taught us all the technical aspects of carrying the guns, how you carry this gun versus this one, how you step in and clear a home. It’s very much like a dance, the way that when you have people on your six, and then you walk in the room, and then they come behind you and you wait.

“So, that part was so much fun, because we basically had military training, which is what marshals do. They have very, very extensive firearms training that is akin to the military.”

On MARSHALS, Santos is partnered with a single horse. “His name is Reuben. he was Harrison Ford’s horse in 1923.”

So, Santos gets to sit where Ford sat? She makes a thrilled face. “How cool is that? And [Reuben] is so cute. his trainer Bobby said Harrison Ford fell in love with him and really wanted to keep him, and Bobby was like, ‘He is not for sale. I could not sell this horse.’ So, yeah. Reuben is the sweetest. He’s very gentle, he was so wonderful to ride.”

Prior to MARSHALS, Santos played paramedic Nia Washington on the medical drama PULSE. That series involved paramedic training, but “as the season went on, I was more so in a romantic love triangle with my costars, and so [MARSHALS] was definitely more of a challenge in terms of the physicality.”

More pertinent in terms of preparation, Santos says, was the independent horror film CROSS (not to be confused with the Prime Video series). “It’s a post-apocalyptic viral outbreak, the zombies, so it’s like a survivalist film. I had just shot CROSS right before I booked MARSHALS. It’s from the writer of THE BOYS, Garth Ennis, and it’s very much like THE LAST OF US. The character I portrayed in that film is so similar to the character that I portray in MARSHALS, and I was so fresh off of it that I felt like, ‘Okay, I’ve kind of been in these shoes.’ So, that really helped me.”

When Santos is called in to audition for a role that requires a lot of physical action, is she called upon to do anything physical in that process, or do producers just evaluate her abilities based on other factors?

“I am more muscular than the average actress. I train five times a week, I lift weights, I eat a hundred and thirty grams of protein a day, I take my training very seriously. So, when I walk in the room, I think it just shows that I am physically capable, and then I end up getting the role because of that, so it’s worked out,” Santos laughs.

“I’m thirty-two now. I’ve learned in the last few years, ‘Okay, I’m never going to be this skinny, dainty damsel-looking girl. I have muscle tissue, I can look pretty strong, and so I’m just going to lean into that, because it’s what I love anyway.’ So, I’ve just accepted that about myself. And then, lo and behold, the roles have come that are in accordance with that.

“I’m learning that I really love this version of myself that can be so physically capable in a role. And so, I hope I get to do it as long as possible. I love the combination of portraying these really strong women who don’t really show their vulnerability until you get to know them, and then also showing how physically capable I can be. It’s been a lot of fun for me.”

Santos relates that the MARSHALS cast have a good time together, especially those who play Andrea’s Marshal Service colleagues. “I think us as the marshals, because we’re the ones primarily always working together, we’ve got a lot of inside jokes, we’re constantly laughing, constantly not taking things as seriously as we should be while we’re about to roll. That part was unexpected to me.

“But with the rest of the cast that comes in, like the days that we have Gil [Birmingham as Thomas Rainwater] and Mo [Brings Plenty as Mo] and Brecken [Merrill as Luke’s son Tate], those days were fun, too, because we all get along so well. We have way too much fun making this show.”

And what would Santos most like people to know about MARSHALS?

“Whether or not you’re a fan of YELLOWSTONE, it’s something you can tune into and enjoy.”

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Article: Exclusive Interview: Actress Ash Santos on new YELLOWSTONE spin-off MARSHALS 

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