Wes Bentley is known to millions of TV viewers as Jamie Dutton on the gritty Western drama Yellowstone, but had things turned out differently, we might associate him with another hugely popular franchise.
In a recent interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Bentley revealed that following his breakout performance in the 1999 Oscar-winning movie American Beauty, he had the opportunity to play Peter Parker in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man—and he said no, leaving the door open for Tobey Maguire to make that role his own.
“From what I understand… I had the offer, one of the offers, a first offer, but whether I did or not, I wasn’t going to do it,” he said. “At that time, we’d come off the Batman disaster, you know the last few Batman films were not great, those kinds of movies were not looking good… I love comic book movies, but at the time I really wanted to do stuff that wasn’t comic book movies, I guess.”
Bentley went on to speak about his experience of starring on a phenomenon like Yellowstone, in which he plays the black sheep attorney son of the Dutton dynasty. “It’s quite a trip, because any hits I’ve had before were really films, and so that’s a different experience, that’s one moment, and on a show like this it’s year after year, and it’s been building in such an interesting way,” he said.
“It can be fun, but it also can be very draining and tiring because it’s a lot of dark stuff,” Bentley continued. “It’s tricky, because you try and play him like he’s not seeing himself that way… It’s more of a blast when I talk to fans who want to give me therapy and are like ‘we’re really worried about Jamie.'”
