“I was scared”: The American Beauty Co-Star Whose Acting Terrified Yellowstone’s Wes Bentley Was Never Kevin Spacey

Wes Bentley received a career-defining masterclass in acting in an American Beauty scene that terrified him to the base of his spine.

The world of Yellowstone and its elusive cowboy fantasy has given us enough drama to keep the bored mind occupied for the next semester. But for Kevin Costner and Wes Bentley’s John and Jaime Dutton, peace is a thing of the distant future.

Meanwhile, as the Yellowstone family tears itself apart from the inside out, the outside world moves on at a relatively slower pace, with nothing but reminiscing memories to survive on. One of those memories involves Wes Bentley and his breakout success story, American Beauty.

Wes Bentley Learns a Lesson From Chris Cooper

Yellowstone may have brought global and unparalleled success to Wes Bentley in the years since 2018, but fame came knocking at his door decades earlier in the form of Sam Mendes’ feature directorial debut, American Beauty.

In an interview held by Entertainment Weekly in 2023, Bentley, star of such projects as Hunger Games and American Horror Story, spoke out on the subject of his breakout film which premiered in 1999.

Recalling a particular day during filming that left a lasting impression on him and his career, Bentley said:

Chris Cooper – he played my father, the Colonel. The scene where he comes, bursts in and beats up Ricky, Chris was off in another room yelling in this worked up space, and I remember him off in that room yelling, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is amazing… and distracting.’

But then I remember that moment of thinking, ‘Oh, I need to use this.’ I listened to him do that and it was working for me. I was scared and I was intimidated and I was like, ‘I’m going to use this.’ So he came bursting through the door and I was able to take that. It was kind one of those moments when I realized, in acting, you gotta use everything. You can’t limit ideas.

Acting is not about comfort. It’s very uncomfortable. So, you know you’re doing it right when, at least in some roles and situations, it is uncomfortable.

Understandably, it was not the legendary Kaiser Soze but Chris Cooper, an icon in the acting world with more cult classic hits to his name than the rest of the cast combined, who was able to leave an impression on Wes Bentley, that would endure to this day in his career.

Alongside other heavy hitters like Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, and Peter Gallagher, the Yellowstone actor left a mark of his own in this powerful story which carried him down the road until he reached Taylor Sheridan’s doorstep.

American Beauty Was Not Kind to Wes Bentley

Taylor Sheridan has had as much luck with acting in Hollywood as water to a wet stone. But in Wes Bentley, he found a shared soul, in terms of how both aspired to be great in their respective art forms only to have their paths altered, leading to an even greater success story than they ever dreamed was possible.

For Sheridan, the alteration came when he was canned from Sons of Anarchy in 2014. For Wes Bentley, however, his path altered after the breakout success of American Beauty. From Hollywood after parties to nightclubs, his journey was laced with drugs and alcohol, and soon enough, benign experiments with hallucinogens turned into a raging addiction to heroin and cocaine.

It was in those early years of his precipitous descent that he crossed paths with a bright-eyed Heath Ledger who reached out a helping hand. Refusing it at first, he went on to regret it later when The Dark Knight star tragically passed away in 2008.

However, from there, his story took on a path mirroring the arc of another legendary CBM actor, Robert Downey Jr. Meeting the love of his life (and future wife) promptly turned him to the light side of the force, turning him sober for good. Since 2010, his rise to success saw him bagging roles in films and television series like The Hunger Games, Interstellar, American Horror Story, We Are Your Friends, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, and Yellowstone.

American Beauty is available for streaming on MGM+ and Paramount+