Kelly Reilly: ‘I wasn’t a natural performer. I was very introverted, very shy’
The first time we encounter Beth Dutton – the tough-as-nails, sharp-as-a-tack, mean-as-a-rattlesnake corporate raider played by Kelly Reilly on the colossally popular Paramount series Yellowstone – she’s going in for the kill.
“I will fire every f***ing employee,” she promises the suit she’s bullying, her voice rock steady. “Then I will sell your leases and your equipment to Chevron for 30 cents on the dollar, and you, buddy, you will have the unique distinction of being the only drilling company to go bankrupt in the largest oil boom of the last century.”
An oil exec doesn’t make the most sympathetic victim, sure, but “buddy” started this company in his garage. The guy has tears in his eyes when Beth forces him to say “thank you” for the privilege of her hostile takeover.
And yet there’s something undeniably tender about the cutthroat ranching heiress as played by Reilly, who imbues all Beth’s icy cruelty with a tinge of melancholy. Though we’ve rarely seen Beth melt across Yellowstone’s first four seasons, the British actor’s captivating, controlled performance always seems to suggest an emotional breakthrough is just around some bend that Beth can never reach. It’s as impossible to imagine someone else in the role as it is to imagine how a working-class kid from the sleepy London suburb of Chessington ended up the savage, beating heart of the most American show on television.
“I remember the desire to get the role was very strong,” Reilly, 45, confesses from Montana, where she and her family are staying as she films Yellowstone’s fifth season. She’d been a professional actor for more than two decades when the series debuted in 2018, but from the beginning of the audition process – no, from the moment she finished reading the script for the first episode – Beth was under Reilly’s skin. “It was pretty [instinctive] how much I wanted to play her.”
There have been other standout roles for Reilly, including the 2012 Robert Zemeckis film Flight opposite Denzel Washington – the first job she booked after moving to America in her early thirties. Before that, she played Caroline Bingley in the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, and Mary Watson in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films. She’s even done TV before, including an electric turn as Vince Vaughn’s hard-nosed moll on season two of True Detective in 2015. By her own account, she’s been a “proper working character actress” since the age of 16. “Getting this job was just another one,” says Reilly matter-of-factly, with the hard-earned practicality of a showbiz vet. “It just happens to be really successful.”
Like really, really, really hugely successful. The series from Taylor Sheridan – the Oscar-nominated writer of contemporary westerns such as Hell or High Water and Wind River – is the number one series on American TV. Its season four finale pulled in more US viewers than the final ever episode of Game of Thrones. Reilly plays the only daughter of the show’s wealthy protagonist, cattleman John Dutton (Kevin Costner). He’s a taciturn cowboy always on the edge of losing the vast family ranch to some enterprising foe, from Native Americans who want to reclaim ancestral land to property developers who would like it for a run of luxury condos.
The show’s politics are as central to its storytelling as they are vague. On the range, the only right that seems to matter is the right to keep on doing what you’ve always been doing without anyone getting in your way. Costner’s character is an aggrieved white man, yes, but you won’t catch him in a cherry-red Maga hat. He’s just a guy in love with a dying way of life – and what’s more American than that?
Beth, with her background as a finance shark, is the show’s political realist. She knows the Wild West is finished as a business proposition. If it were up to her, she’d bulldoze the land for an airport tarmac. But she returns home to the family ranch in season one to eke out a little more solvency for all the doomed men in her life, which include her heedless brother Kayce (Luke Grimes), her salt of the earth partner – a cowboy called Rip (Cole Hauser), and her father, a man committed to going down in a blaze of machismo.
“I certainly hadn’t seen this sort of character on TV. I find her more in plays, these enormous women like Medea or Lady Macbeth,” Reilly says, searching to explain the role she calls “one of the greatest” she’s ever had. She gossips about Beth with the same reticence you’d reserve for a close friend: she’s careful not to judge her, and quick to explain away her faults. “There was something huge about her and powerful and terrifying.”
But maybe the most underrated job perk has been the excuse to spend five months a year in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, hiking and riding horses between the mighty Rockies and the wooded Sapphire Mountains. “Everything about this job was, ‘yes, please’.”
Despite a long career in film and television, Reilly’s first language is theatre. She was a 14-year-old student at a local comprehensive school when two drama teachers – Barbara and Phil Tong, who would go on to tutor actor Andrew Garfield, as well – introduced her to names like Chekhov and Stanislavski. The couple took Reilly to see plays in London, including both parts of Tony Kushner’s seven-hour Aids drama Angels in America at the National Theatre. “I remember my heart was in my mouth,” Reilly tells me, evoking what it felt like to be young and falling in love with something for the first time. She saw The Seagull with Judi Dench and Bill Nighy; she saw John Turturro in Brecht’s Nazi allegory The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. She can rattle off the names of plays and theatres and actors she saw nearly 30 years ago like she’s got the playbills laid out in front of her. “I just remember feeling so alive.”
