This story contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Dutton Ranch, “El Padrino.”

A major player was just taken off the board in the Dutton Ranch season 1 finale, and while all signs point to an obvious suspect, even star Juan Pablo Raba wasn't so sure about his character’s guilt—or if he'd still have a job next season. We had the pleasure of notifying him that, unlike Rob-Will (Jai Courtney), his character Joaquin did emerge unscathed.

“To be honest, I thought that maybe I also didn’t make it out alive,” says Raba, who still hasn't seen the episode yet. “Like, one of the options could have been that they cut to a bang in the car. So that’s awesome that you're telling me that I make it alive—that's the first time I've heard it!”

Yellowstone’s sequel series initially slow-played Joaquin, the adopted son of 10 Petal ranch owner Beulah (Annette Bening). But things took a turn as Beulah’s biological son, the troubled Rob-Will, returned from rehab, threatening to kill his brother if Joaquin was named Beulah’s successor. Once passed over, Joaquin called his father, Mariano (Raoul Max Trujillo), a former 10 Petal farmhand who, when Joaquin was young, fled to Mexico after taking the heat for Beulah killing Rob-Will’s father, who had raped her.

South of the border, Mariano became a drug kingpin, and when the 10 Petal’s finances were in trouble, he and Joaquin offered Beulah a solution: smuggling fentanyl in cattle. Just as Mariano arrives in Rio Paloma to push Beulah to put Joaquin in charge, Rip (Cole Hauser) and Beth (Kelly Reilly) have uncovered the illegal operation. Mariano sends his men after the ride-or-die couple, while also ordering Joaquin to kill his brother—despite Joaquin being known as someone who lacks a “killer instinct.”

Mariano’s crew fails to handle Rip and Cole, but they do successfully kidnap the duo’s own adopted son, Carter (Finn Little), who was set to runoff with Rob-Will’s daughter, Oreana (Natalie Alyn Lind). And as she packs her things, Oreana has a sweet moment with her father, which is interrupted by the doorbell. The camera stays with Oreana as Rob-Will goes to answer, only for a gunshot to then ring out. She rushes to find Rob-Will dead and a truck speeding off. The shooter is not shown pulling the trigger, but prime candidate Joaquin is next seen in his truck, crying, and looking at a gun.

We'll have to wait to find out whether Joaquin finally became the killer that his father always wanted; in the meantime, we chatted with Raba about thinking he was dying earlier in season 1 and playing directly into his fear.

Actually, it was when I was reading episode six. I got to the scene where Chet (Hart Denton) arrives with a gun, and I thought, Okay, this is it. It was fun while it lasted. I was getting ready to call my agent, and then I'm like, I'll just read the other page, and oh, I'm still alive! With the type of show it is, you have no idea, and I never knew if I was going to make it. We were constantly calling each other, “Did you read this episode?" "Oh my god, what's gonna happen?" And then you see people dying and you're making the calls, like, “Hey buddy, how are you feeling?” It sucks! Every single episode feels like such a coin toss, not knowing what they're gonna do with you. As an actor, as much as we want to have certainty and to know the whole arc and how your character is going to develop, it's also exciting.

I did a show with Navy SEALs, Six, and they told me, "Huge differences aside, this job feels a lot like what we do, in the way that you guys have to create a family in a very, very short period of time and it feels like every day is a battle, and, at the end of the show, you know you're going to win a war." So you get really close to the people you work with, and it's like you lose a comrade. I felt like I had to have that call with Hart on episode 6, and then I had to have that call with Jai. I mean, I didn't have to, but I wanted to. And about the Rob-Will encounter—how do we actually know it was Joaquin?

I would love to tell you that I know, but, honestly, I don't. Somebody very smart is behind this decision, and they just gave us a ton of possibilities. This could have been played in many, many ways. All we see is a guy in a car, and then we see a car drive away, but nobody actually says, "Oh, I saw that guy do it." Mariano is a heavy hitter, and the question is, did he really trust his son to do that, knowing what we know about Joaquin?

That was very, very complicated and confusing for me, because I didn’t know exactly what I was performing. Christina Alexandra Voros directed the finale, and the conversations were, “How do we play this? Because we can play it like he did it and is super satisfied, or he did it and is terrified, or he didn't do it and saw somebody else do it.” Christina was very helpful with that and had me do a couple options. I tried to give them as many possibilities as I can, and then they edit it the way it works the best for the show.

Playing Joaquin has been one of the biggest challenges in my career, mostly because he is a lone wolf and doesn't have a lot of people to interact with. So, for the first half of the show, I was basically imagining what my interactions with other people would look like. I fully understood my character, or at least the way I was going to play him, on episode 6 when I shot my scene with Cole. As I'm going to get into that truck after being shot, I see this guy, and Cole is a sweetheart, but Rip is a scary dude. I remember thinking, I'm going to be real with this; I feel very vulnerable in this moment. Which is the opposite of what this whole macho, bravado cowboy universe is. Everybody's so tough, and I'm like, You know what, I'm not going to act tough in front of this guy. I'm scared to my bones of Rip, a gun, and a truck, in the middle of the night. And that really shifted the way I was performing Joaquin.

There's a detail about that party scene in episode 7: Rob-Will tips Joaquin's hat, and I learned that that was the most disrespectful thing you can do to a cowboy. Earlier, we saw that it's big for Joaquin to buy a hat, because he thinks he’s going to be crowned and that's his crown. And just seeing Rob-Will tipping his hat, you can tell this is not good between them. I wish we had more, because I think there's a lot there in play. This show was really good at leaving you with more questions than answers; there's a bunch of unresolved things.

Even if it wasn't explicitly on camera, I think one of the biggest heartbreaks for Joaquin is his niece. He saw her standing by Rob-Will when he got crowned, and the way I see it, Joaquin has to be a big father figure for her. I don't know if you noticed, but she also has a Texas A&M ring on, so she went to the same school as Joaquin, and trust me, Rob-Will did not help her with schoolwork. So I'm picturing Oreana talking to him about boys, parties, and so much more. And the way that she reacts when Joaquin comes into the room at the hospital, you can tell that there's a big bond there. So there's a lot of meat to be put on the barbecue with these two. And if she thinks that Joaquin did it, that definitely changes the dynamic, and even if we don’t know if it’s true, what does she want to do with that information?

As of now, I think the scene where he makes that call is the most important scene for Joaquin in the whole show. Because he is smart enough to understand that that's a point of no return. Joaquin didn't want to be like his dad, and thinking he can’t do it any other way, he is literally asking his last resource, and that has to be heartbreaking. Like, imagine you did everything right for all of your life, when you could have done everything wrong. He decided to go to school, to get a degree, knowing that, at any point, he could have called his dad and that ranch would have been his. But no, he wanted to make that woman proud, to make her feel like a mom. And he knows that, by picking up that burner phone, all that is gone, and that a new Joaquin will have to somehow emerge.

So, in every scene you see Joaquin in from there on, there's a mix of heartbreak, resentment, pain, and utter disgust for having to bring these people in. He wanted to be a Texan rancher, not a kingpin. That's why it's so frustrating for him. Whatever happens with Joaquin now, I’m really looking forward to it, because I have played a lot of characters, but I've never played a character whose real inception story comes from heartbreak.