Kelly Reilly plays Beth Duton, the brutal, wounded, savagely funny heroine in Yellowstone. Photo / Victor Llorente, The New York Times
Kelly Reilly turned her Yellowstone character, Beth, into a folk hero. As the show prepares to end, at least for now, “I’m very happy to let her disappear,” she said.
If Beth Dutton were Kelly Reilly’s friend, if she were sitting here, in the garden of a SoHo hotel in lower Manhattan, Reilly would worry. She would urge Beth to stop smoking, to drink less, to give therapy a try.
“If she were my best friend, I’d be like, ‘Give yourself an easier time,’” Reilly said.
But Beth Dutton is no one’s friend. She is the brutal, wounded, savagely funny heroine of the Montana-set Paramount Network drama Yellowstone. Reilly, 47, has played her since the show began in 2018. The second half of the fifth and apparently final season arrives in New Zealand on Neon on November 11. They will be the show’s first episodes without its star Kevin Costner, who departed the series, citing scheduling issues, amid reports of tensions between him and the creator, Taylor Sheridan.
During the series, Beth has faced down attempted rape, attempted assassination, professional back-stabbing, personal betrayal. Through it all, Reilly has played her with a kind of animal ferocity (take, for example, a Season 1 scene of Beth scaring off a wolf) shot through with unexpected tenderness. Hers is the rare performance that feels authentically dangerous – for the actor, for the character, for anyone watching at home.
That the Emmys haven’t recognised Reilly suggests that there is something at least a little wrong with Emmys. But Beth remains a favourite among the show’s fans. There are TikToks and supercuts of Beth’s most vicious comebacks, mugs and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Don’t make me go Beth Dutton on you” and “You are the trailer park, and I am the tornado”.
Reilly is no Beth Dutton. She is English by birth and a redhead. In person, she is softer, more thoughtful, profoundly empathetic in a way that Beth would find embarrassing. When I met her at that boutique hotel, on an afternoon in mid-September, Reilly wore loose silk separates, not an out-for-blood business suit, and ordered tea for us (regrettably) in place of Beth’s preferred bourbon.
She was sometimes wonderfully outspoken, as is Beth. And when I unexpectedly burst into tears in front of her (Beth Dutton has that effect on people, but this was not Reilly’s fault), she displayed her character’s fierce loyalties and occasional profanity.
Yet that outspokenness only goes so far. When asked about the Yellowstone finale, she was circumspect. “It’s an ending,” she said. “We are absolutely ending this show.” (Paramount, which wouldn’t share screeners, was also cagey.) And in contrast to Beth, Reilly seemed like the kind of woman who welcomed introspection. (Another popular Beth quote: “I am the rock therapists break themselves against.”)
In most ways, Reilly is grateful that Beth has never done the work. Reilly has watched shows where the characters go to therapy – she tends to fall asleep. The world of Yellowstone is heightened, and Beth is as big, as adamant, as any of its mountains. She’s Medea, Antigone, Lady Macbeth in a push-up bra and a Stetson. And Reilly loves her, in all her pain and anger.
“I’d rather be on her side,” Reilly said. “I’d rather have her in front of me than somebody who is meditating.”
Reilly grew up in a London suburb. Her father was a police officer, and her mother worked part-time. A career as an actor was the stuff of fantasy. As a child she would tell people that’s what she wanted to be, but she didn’t believe it.
Still, she wept when she saw her first play. As a teenager, she travelled into London often, seeing every play she could. “It was my drug of choice,” she said. She didn’t think that she could afford drama school, but she wanted to try. At a practice audition, at 16, she caught the eye of a casting director who hired her for Prime Suspect, opposite Helen Mirren.
More roles followed. Reilly skipped drama school in favour of paid work. She had no technique, no training, just instinct and remarkable access to her emotions.
“I had to feel it every night,” she said. “I had to just give it my everything. And I think that is because I didn’t know anything else.”
By her mid-20s, onstage, Reilly was already a leading lady. Her specialty, it seemed, was in pain, women in extremis. (This is arguably still her specialty.) The director James Macdonald worked with her early in her career, in 2001, on Sarah Kane’s Blasted, an unusually difficult play. Macdonald was impressed with Reilly’s ability to give her whole self to a character. “She was ruthless in getting as far as she could with that,” he said.
Michael Grandage met her a couple of years later on After Miss Julie, Patrick Marber’s gloss on the Strindberg play.
“It was pretty devastating what she did,” he recalled. “There was no technique as such, but because there was no technique, there was no hiding. It was full on every single performance.”
Grandage worked with her again, four years later, in a revival of Othello in which Reilly played the doomed Desdemona. She was 30 by then and burned out on tragic heroines. She has never known how to separate herself from her characters, and dying onstage every night had begun to feel unhealthy. So she stepped toward milder screen work, appearing in the Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes movies as Dr Watson’s wife.
She did her first work in America around that time, appearing in the 2011 Robert Zemeckis film Flight and in the second season of True Detective. In Flight, Reilly stars opposite Denzel Washington as a recovering addict. Zemeckis, who also cast Reilly in the film Here, which is in cinemas now, admired her screen presence and her apparent ease.
“There were a lot of scenes in Flight that were incredibly full of emotion,” Zemeckis said. “Kelly was just there. It was just completely simple.”
Flight was perhaps her best-known credit before Yellowstone. Reilly, not yet a name, had to audition to play Beth. And even though she had given up on tragic heroines, she wanted to play Beth badly. She was dazzled by her power, her irreverence, her wounds. She knew the role would be a challenge. “The delicacy of me didn’t necessarily work for Beth,” she said. So she conjured someone stronger.
A banker by profession, Beth is fiercely protective of her father (Costner) and capable of surprising violence when her family is threatened. Another actress might have leaned into toughness, but Reilly allows for greater complication. Reilly identifies with lines that Beth quotes in Season 4, taken from a book of essays by naturalist Gretel Ehrlich: “To be tough is to be fragile, to be tender is to be truly fierce.”
Reilly plays the role with an unabashed femininity. As Beth, her voice is low and soft, her sex appeal pronounced. “Her femininity is to be celebrated,” Reilly said. “It can intimidate and it can seduce and it can terrify.” And if she doesn’t shy away from Beth’s anger, she understands that anger as born of loss.
That isn’t easy to play. Reilly will prepare for months for a climactic scene. “I don’t want it to be chaotic,” she said. “I don’t want it to be out of control.” If mainlining Beth’s violence has become less effortful over the years, it still isn’t comfortable.
Many of Reilly’s most extreme scenes are opposite Wes Bentley, who plays Beth’s adopted brother, Jamie, as in a Season 4 argument in which she throws a mousetrap at him and threatens him with murder. “It’s a real fight,” he said of these scenes. “And I’m destroyed.” Acting opposite Reilly leaves marks.
“It’s so much that I feel it for days and weeks,” he said. “I may feel it for years.”
Reilly feels it, too. She’ll often sleep for days after scenes like that. If Beth sometimes exhausts her, the role has also lent Reilly confidence, a sense of her own power.
“Beth has given me a backbone,” she said. “There’s a strength in playing her all these years that I’ve definitely found a bit of.”
But only a bit. She worries that people are disappointed when they meet her, because they expect Beth. But when I saw her at the hotel, I was in the midst of a small personal crisis and not masking it particularly well. Reilly responded with ferocious empathy. (“Feel it!” she told me emphatically, with an added expletive. “You have to feel it.”) And I was grateful in that moment that it was Reilly opposite me and not Beth. Then again Beth would have bought me a double whiskey and offered to punch someone, and that would have been fine, too.
Beth wasn’t entirely absent on that afternoon. Reilly had only finished shooting Yellowstone two weeks before, and she has never been adept at leaving characters behind. “There’s a little bit of schizophrenia going on, but it doesn’t last as long as it used to,” she said.
There are rumours of a further season, or a spinoff. And while Reilly didn’t address them directly, she wouldn’t mind. “If there is a new beginning, it’s a new beginning,” she said. She might enjoy showing a more mature Beth. “I’m like, all right, let’s get up and put our big girl pants on,” she said.
For now, after seven years, she is ready to let Beth ride away.
“It’s a big energy,” she said. “That’s not something in my body that I need. I love her, but I’m very happy to let her disappear.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexis Soloski
Photographs by: Victor Llorente
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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