by Gill Pringle in LA
Kelly Reilly has gone from a sleepy English suburb to becoming the fiercest woman in Hollywood.
Over the past eight years, fans have grown to relish her ballistic outbursts as Beth Dutton, first on Yellowstone and now on its spin-off Dutton Ranch.
“Beth will get her teeth out. She’s like a fucking badger! She’ll take your throat out,” says Reilly.
And Beth Dutton doesn’t just fight with her words – she’s a scrapper too, leading to her character getting into multiple physical brawls, one fight even leaving her with a permanent facial scar.
“I love that fire of Beth, when it comes out. She’s a force of nature,” says the actress who displays little of Beth Dutton’s fiery personality in person – soft-spoken and reflective when we meet her.
But one thing she does share in common with her alter ego is a love of horses and the great outdoors.
“I have a little bit of land in England and, one day in my future when I’m not busy leaving it all the time and I can be there to really look after it, I want to have a place with animals where I’m not handing it over to somebody else to look after,” she says.
“I’d want to do it myself. So, my dream in a little while is to fill that land with some horses and a little vineyard because where I live in West Sussex, there are all these beautiful sparkling wine vineyards popping up, which are amazing.
“And so maybe, we could just mooch about in that territory for a minute. But it’s certainly not a ranch. It’s a field with some horses and donkeys in it and maybe some goats. The idea of taking on a huge amount of land and that being alive, like, I’ve witnessed people who do it and it is a life. It’s a livelihood. It is a way of life, and it is a full commitment. And I don’t have that desire for it, and I don’t have that capacity for it,” says Reilly who currently divides her time between the UK and New York – with months spent in Texas where Dutton Ranch is now filmed.
If Reilly’s Beth and husband, Cole Hauser’s Rip Wheeler have been intertwined since Taylor Sheridan first debuted Yellowstone eight years ago, the screen couple were nonetheless daunted at the task of headlining the show’s spin-off, Dutton Ranch.
“There was definitely a sense of finding new feet for all of us,” she says. “But it’s like, how do you maintain the soul of something while also wanting to explore new parts of our characters? You know, the new and the old in one thing?
“We started with the fire, that is figuratively the end of Yellowstone. She even says, ‘We’ll start again’.
“And out of the ashes, out of loss – is new life. I wanted Beth to wonder for a minute what does that look like. She’s lost her father. She’s lost her reason for living, which was to fight for him, to preserve a legacy, to preserve a land. And now all of that is gone. Who is she? What sort of woman is she beyond that? It was something I was always curious to lean into playing. Who is she beyond the ranch and beyond her father? And now she is a wife and mother figure, a matriarch.
“That excited me. I knew the Beth of wild days. We all know her very well, and that hasn’t gone anywhere. But I was interested in finding the adult woman in there that could align with her husband and making a new life for themselves. And what do they want? So that’s where I was moving into. And also, not having Taylor Sheridan’s words [with Chad Feehan showrunning Dutton Ranch]. Beth was his, and so now I had to take her on as myself. It was like passing on the baton, really.
“And so, with that, there are losses, and there are also things that I could get to explore that maybe he didn’t have much interest in exploring. It’s a brand-new creative endeavour, and there’s something just so beautiful about that for us,” says the actress who has some A-list co-stars on Dutton Ranch – including Ed Harris, Annette Bening and Australia’s own Jai Courtney.
“And then we got to Texas too,” adds Hauser who’s been on his own journey as the solid and reliable Rip.
“It’s interesting, because he’s such a pillar of a man. He’s so consistent in who he is. And I think, the way we started Dutton Ranch, it just gets spun on its heels immediately. It’s about trying to adapt to a new environment.
“And trying to cowboy and deal with the Hispanic culture in Texas and be able to try to get along with them and their language, their land. So, being able to go and cowboy down there was just a feat in itself. It’s the heat down there…
“I mean, it’s just different – everything’s different. You know, becoming a father figure in a way for the first time. And really, that responsibility. There’s always this great strength and a beautiful love between Beth and Rip, but they’re challenged.
“So, it’s a new world for me. A new way of trying to get along. And by the way, they’re not at the top anymore. They’re at the bottom. And that to me, it’s such an honour to play a character for so long, and then get to a place where it’s like, let’s burn it all to the ground, and let’s start fresh, and let’s get after it and let’s challenge these characters at the highest level. And I feel like if we can continue to do that into the second season, we’ll hopefully be successful,” he adds.
Reilly and Hauser have certainly leaned on one another during the process of transformation. “And because there are so many fans of the show who really are invested over all these years, there is a responsibility; you don’t want to get it this far and then mess it up. I didn’t want to drop the ball,” says Reilly.
“I really wanted to honour the world. I wanted to honour the soul of it. I feel it’s a responsibility, but I don’t mind as long as I’m shouldering it with Cole. We’re such a team, him and I,” says the actress who was a familiar face on British TV with 2009 – 2012 crime drama, Above Suspicion, briefly dating Guy Ritchie while appearing in a minor role in two of his Sherlock Holmes movies.
But it was her starring turn opposite Denzel Washington in 2012 drama Flight that really put her on the map in the US, leading to a role in hit HBO series True Detective while also making her 2015 Broadway debut in Harold Pinter’s Old Times.
Ask her why she thinks Beth Dutton has become so iconic – inspiring a Monopoly game, t-shirts, socks and greeting cards, even becoming a popular Halloween figure – she says, “Well, we all have a bit of Beth Dutton in us I think.”
Dutton Ranch is streaming on Paramount+ now
