Watch Dierks Bentley Play 13 Different Characters in ‘Gone’ Video

And they're all having a rough day ...

Written by Chris Parton
Watch Dierks Bentley Play 13 Different Characters in ‘Gone’ Video
Dierks Bentley; Photo courtesy of The GreenRoom

Dierks Bentley takes acting to a hilarious new level in his official video for the single, “Gone,” playing playing 13 different characters — who are all having a really bad day.

All about the places heartbreak can take you — in your mind, at least — the clip finds Bentley becoming the hard-luck characters he encounters on TV, and poking fun at himself in the process.

The story starts out with guy who’s not doing so hot, barricaded in a motel room and drinking his sorrows away in the wake of a breakup. With nothing better to do, he flips through TV channels looking for an escape … but things only get worse. Time and time again, Bentley watches himself come up short, just like in his love life.

He plays a fedora-wearing gent who gets left behind in a Casablanca-style drama. A criminal making a getaway from the cops that goes nowhere. He’s a sitcom-dad who can’t do anything right, a bad-boy detective who doesn’t diffuse the bomb and even a hapless knight who can’t slay the dragon, among others. And it all plays into the uptempo song, which finds a guy struggling to get over the end of a relationship.

“I’ve been gone, I’ve been gone / I’ve been sittin’ on the couch watching TV all day long / All day long, I’ve been tryna figure out how a good thing went wrong / Faster than that freight train, farther than that airplane / Sadder than a country song / Headed down that highway, anywhere but my way / Ever since you moved on, I’ve been gone,” goes the down-in-the-dumps chorus.

“It just always ends poorly for me in this video,” Bentley says in a statement. “I definitely had a lot more fun making it than it looks though … we got to film a bunch of scenes inspired by some of my favorite shows like The Office, MacGyver, Game Of Thrones and Full House. And I got to collaborate with some new directors I’ve never worked with, so I left at the end of a really long day feeling really happy and inspired about a kind of sad song.”

The video for “Gone” was shot in Nashville last November by directors Wes Edwards, Ed Pryor, Travis Nicholson, Running Bear and Sam Siske, with animation by Skylar Wilson. Dierks Bentley released the track in October, and he’s spent most of 2020 in Colorado as he makes the best of a year off the road, but has recently said he’s got an “awesome” tour lined up for next year.