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In the annals of television history, we’ve never quite met a woman like Beth Dutton. Played with terrifying ease and almost startling American authenticity by British actor Kelly Reilly, she is as ruthless as she is vulnerable, and all at once mesmerising and terrifying. She is quite possibly the toughest lady on TV.
Historically, strong women on the screen were either trained soldiers, such as Game of Thrones’ Brienne of Tarth, or sultry manipulators, such as the Cleopatra-esque Alexis Carrington in Dynasty. They played in three dimensions, but often off the back of single notes. To meet a woman like Beth Dutton, who is all consistency and contradiction in one breath, is rare.
Kelly Reilly as Beth Dutton in Yellowstone.
“I enjoy polarities and complexities and conundrums in people in my life, and I really enjoy them in writing and great characters,” says Reilly, sitting down to unpack her role in the Yellowstone spin-off Dutton Ranch, and the explosively dramatic finale to its first season.
“Not letting her lean into caricature is really important to me,” Reilly says. “It would have been an easy thing to do. I try and just keep approaching the work with a level of seriousness and truthful intention, integrity. To allow myself to just trust that if the writing is good, I could hit that ceiling and then go further, and then bring it back down again, you know.
“What is it when she is that fiercely destructive or fiercely protective? It has to mean something; it has to be for a reason. It’s not just this, sort of, random, crazy character. It’s because she feels like she’s fighting a war, and that’s certainly how she felt in six seasons of Yellowstone, to play her. So, now, putting the weapons down for a minute, it’s a moment of reflection and what do I want, what does she want, what makes her happy?”
And what does make her happy?
“Honestly, the truth is him,” Reilly says, gesturing to her co-star Cole Hauser, who plays Beth’s husband, Rip Wheeler, the foreman and enforcer of the Yellowstone ranch in Montana.
Cole Hauser as Rip Wheeler and Reilly as Beth Dutton in Dutton Ranch.
In Yellowstone, Beth Dutton was a fierce and sometimes frightening presence. One of the series’ most iconic scenes, in which Beth defends her sister-in-law, Monica, from racial profiling and an accusation of shoplifting by viciously retaliating against the boutique owner who accused her, is still a fixture on social media channels, in a seemingly perpetual loop.
“You don’t really see Beth on the back foot in any of Yellowstone, which enables her to maybe, you know, be left alone in this moment of just trying to just live a quiet, simple life that she dreams of with her family,” Reilly says. “I think that is what her dream is. Not to own a piece of land that everybody wants to take chunks out of. She doesn’t want to fight.”
But the warrior spirit is never far from the surface, and was brought back on vivid display in the first season finale of Dutton Ranch, which aired this month, in which Beth and Rip discovered their new partner, ranch owner Beulah (Annette Bening) had brought them into business with the mob, resulting in a shootout and the abduction of Beth and Rip’s son, Carter (Finn Little).
“There’s that essence of like, well, if she has to, she’s gonna,” says Reilly. “So, building up to that in the last episode of what it is that could be taken from her, that she’s willing to go back into warrior mode, it was fun for me to remember that that was still there. And actually, that is, you know, such an engine in her.”
Leaving five seasons of Yellowstone behind to effectively begin a new story was not too challenging, says Reilly. “We knew what this was, we knew where we were going, we had an audience that were with us,” she says. “There was a sense of a ship that we knew how to sail. And this one, it was a brand-new endeavour that felt as every new creative endeavour should feel. Exciting but challenging; a sense of finding new feet for all of us. [And asking] how do you maintain the soul of something while also wanting to explore new parts of characters?”
Hauser concurs. “I know the character so well, I feel very confident in his skin,” he says. “But there were challenges. Not having [creator Taylor Sheridan] there; for us to really kind of be able to work with these new writers, these new directors, these people. Everything had changed. The only kind of normality that we had whatsoever was [Little, as on-screen son] Carter, and Christina [Alexandra Voros, one of the show’s producers]. It certainly was a challenge. We worked our arses off this year.”
And yet, Yellowstone, Sheridan’s original masterwork, which has spawned an expanded universe comprising now five shows – 1883, 1923, Marshals and Dutton Ranch – draws a long shadow across all of those programs. Sheridan himself is a somewhat elusive figure. Media shy, he does not bask in the kind of uber-producer glory that has, at various times, been heaped on other filmmakers with five shows in the can.
“I do feel the weight of it,” says Reilly, referring to the Yellowstone legacy. “I feel so proud of what we accomplished on Yellowstone. And because there are so many fans of the show who really are invested over all these years, there is a responsibility to, you know, you don’t want to get it this far and then mess it up. I didn’t want to drop the ball. I really wanted to honour the world. I wanted to honour the soul of it.”
Reilly says she and Hauser form a great team.Emerson Miller/Paramount+
And with Hauser, “we’re such a team”, Reilly says. “We lean on each other. We ask each other on advice. So we’re not doing this on our own. And I think the first season was the hardest one to get us out the gate to really what is this. And then [a] second season, I know we already have ideas about where we want to take this. But it’s an honour. It’s an honour to be working. It’s an honour to be an actor in a show that people have such true love and investment in.”
While the landscape may be unforgiving, and the twists and turns in the story brutal, even violent at times, Reilly and Hauser believe that Dutton Ranch is, in the end, a classic television love story.
“They’re each other’s only love,” says Reilly. “They loved each other when they were 15. They’ve never loved another person. They’ve never been romantic with another person. They are each other’s other half. So, in a strange way, it almost feels it’s a love story, out of another time. There’s a romance about them. And there is a [sense of] I’ve got your back. And this mirror image of either, like, he is one side of the coin and she is the other.
“We were given six years, six seasons, of Yellowstone written by Taylor Sheridan, and he loved writing for Beth and Rip,” Reilly says. “He created such a love story from these fierce characters. But when they’re with one another, you get to see their heart. That was the gift, and we’re just trying to protect it now and expand on it. She’s so vulnerable with him. And he’s vulnerable with her. And I think people love to see that.”
Dutton Ranch is streaming on Paramount+.