Sheridan grew up on a ranch in Cranfills Gap, Texas. His family lived minimally, not having a stereo system in their house. His parents would sit in their station wagon, which had an 8-track player, listening to music to pass the time. Had they not lost the property in the early 1990s, said Sheridan, "I would still be living there."
Sheridan wrote Comancheria after Sicario. Comancheria sold first but was stuck in development for quite a few years, appearing on the Black List in 2012. It was later retitled Hell or High Water and was released in August 2016, starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster, and again received critical acclaim. For his screenplay, Sheridan received a large amount of awards attention, earning BAFTA, Golden Globe Award, and Academy Award nominations.
Sheridan has written several films, including the screenplay for Sicario (2015), for which Sheridan was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. He also wrote the screenplay for Hell or High Water (2016), which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
Sheridan wrote a sequel to Sicario. titled Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which will be released in 2018. On September 15, 2016, Deadline reported that Sheridan has been set by Sony Pictures and Escape Artists to script the American remake of the Matthias Schoenaerts starrer Disorder, a 2015 French film directed by Alice Winocour. Escape Artists' Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal, Steve Tisch and Tony Shaw will produce the remake and David Beaubaire is overseeing it for the studio. James Mangold will direct.
In 2017, Sheridan created the television series Yellowstone starring Kevin Costner that is set to air on the Paramount Network in 2018.
He is known for toying with the form and structure of a screenplay in his work. In Sicario, Sheridan incorporated a "five-act structure and a five-act structure within that." He believes in the intelligence of the audience, and uses the structure and context of his stories as a way to subvert expectations: "I look at each movie as, ‘How am I breaking the rules this time?’"
