Kelly Reilly and the 'Yellowstone' Succession Drama
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“I have been asked to go on Cameo for, like, a lot of money,” Kelly Reilly says, referring to the platform where fans can pay to have celebrities record personalized video messages. “But they don’t want me going on as me. They want Beth Dutton telling them to go fuck themselves.”
It’s a testament to Reilly, who is so uncannily convincing as the self-destructive, acid-tongued, Tito’s-swilling tour de force she plays on Yellowstone that the show’s rabid legion of fans have trouble separating the actress from her character—or simply refuse to do so. They call her Beth on the street. They come up to her and ask to get a drink (the answer is always a polite no thanks). When they found out Reilly was actually British, all hell broke loose (Google it).
But considering the fact that the actress, 47, has been in this business for three decades (and that Yellowstone is, well, not reality), it would be more than fair to expect people to know these things. She doesn’t see it that way. “I quite like that they don’t know my actual name. I’m very private. I don’t want people to know where I am, what I’m doing, my inner workings,” she says. “In a time of oversharing, it feels rebellious to hold back.”
Fortunately for us, anonymity is easy on this crisp September morning in New York, not least because we’re huddled in a quiet corner of the garden at the Crosby Street Hotel. And possibly because, mere hours after wrapping this Town & Country cover shoot, Reilly has dyed her hair red. The act serves a dual purpose: It’s a metaphorical shedding of a character she has inhabited for seven years. (Part two of Yellowstone’s fifth season, its last, is currently airing on Paramount Network.) And it’s prep for a fresh chapter; she will be spending the next few months in Wales filming Under Salt Marsh, a crime series in which she plays an ex-detective. (“There’s something about a new character clearing the palate for a different woman to move in.”)
Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of Yellowstone mania, it will either delight or disappoint you to learn that a dye job and an English accent are not the only ways Reilly differs from Beth Dutton. Can you imagine, for instance, John Dutton’s firecracker daughter saying anything like “Empathy is everything”? Or remarking on how lovely it is to be sitting outside on this beautiful day? Or calling gardens and trees and woodlands her medicine? Or ordering fruit for breakfast?
“There are certain actors who are always some version of themselves in any role. The relationship between Kelly and Beth is not that,” says Christina Voros, a director and executive producer on Yellow-stone. “The work that Kelly has done to embody this person is profound. And it’s not until you step on- and off-set with her that you feel the massive distance between the two.”
A sprawling neo-western with the Shakespearean ambitions of Succession and the soapy appeal of Dallas, Yellowstone chronicles the violent travails of a Montana cattle dynasty led by John Dutton (Kevin Costner), the sixth-generation owner of a ranch the size of Rhode Island, whose sole mission is to protect his land from California property developers and Wall Street vultures desperate to carve it up and turn it into the next Aspen. Among John’s children, Beth, his only daughter, is his most lethal soldier. Highly intelligent and ferociously loyal, she’s a finance shark who will singlehandedly take down Fortune 500 companies and make grown men crumble with her blistering verbiage. She speeds around in a Bentley, chain-smokes Marlboro Reds, drinks vodka smoothies for breakfast, chases wolves for fun, and starts bar fights just because someone came on to her man (ranch foreman Rip, played by Cole Hauser).
“I love gearing up to play her, because there’s an adrenaline to Beth and it’s very energizing,” Reilly says. “But it’s also incredibly gnarly. I have to hide all of me away to put some of that on. I love her, but I can’t live with her.”
Beth is, to put it mildly, a hot mess. Unresolved childhood traumas can do that to a person—and she has plenty of those. “So much of acting is psychology, right?” Reilly says. “It’s like a treasure hunt. Where are the nuggets that lead me to understand who this person is?” Take her vitriolic relationship with her brother Jamie (Wes Bentley). The roots of her seething resentment are revealed in a flashback scene in season three: When they were teenagers he took her to get an abortion but secretly signed her up for a hysterectomy also. “To go as far as she has to go as Beth going after Jamie, we have to trust each other to a degree that goes beyond even friendship,” Bentley told the Los Angeles Times in 2022. “We just naturally had that from the beginning. We get along so well. That allows us to really dig into this hatred.”
Voros adds, “The way she just explodes into this role, it’s breathtaking to watch, to be honest. I don’t think anyone realizes how much work goes into creating this character that seems so natural onscreen.”
As a “very shy” child growing up in a borough outside London, Reilly never dared to imagine a future in the performing arts. Then two drama teachers at her secondary school—whom she still calls on for advice—changed all that. They introduced her to Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shakespeare. They took her to the West End, where she saw The Cherry Orchard starring Judi Dench and Bill Nighy (“I get goosebumps thinking about it”) and where, at age 15, she queued all day for standing room tickets to the first production of Angels in America.
“It was like a drug. Nothing made me feel like that. I had never experienced the excitement and rawness I saw with actors onstage performing in plays that were very serious,” she recalls. “It felt sacred, like we were being transformed and healed coming together in this human experience of art. I wanted to run off to the circus with them. I wanted to do that.” She devoured books on Stanislavski and Uta Hagen and became, in her own words, “a complete nerd.”
And that was about as much formal education as she received before landing her first gig, at 17, opposite Helen Mirren in the British police procedural Prime Suspect. She was discovered soon afterward by playwright and director Terry Johnson, who secured her next several stage roles in the West End. By 2004 Reilly, then 26, had become the youngest person to be nominated for an Olivier, for her performance as the title character in After Miss Julie. There were small parts onscreen, too, including in Pride & Prejudice (2005) and the two Sherlock films (2009 and 2011) with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.
Her Hollywood break came in 2012 with Flight, starring Denzel Washington as an alcoholic pilot who makes a miraculous crash landing; Reilly held her own as his drug addict love interest, Nicole. Director Robert Zemeckis still remembers her audition. “She came in, read a couple of scenes with Denzel, and instantly got the part. Denzel and I looked at each other, and we knew she was the one. She absolutely nailed it.”
Twelve years later Reilly has reunited with Zemeckis for his latest film, Here (in theaters now), a multigenerational family tale set in a single living room starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, and Paul Bettany. She plays a devoted housewife and mother named Rose—the antithesis of Beth. “I know the real Kelly, and I know what a versatile actress she is,” Zemeckis says. “This is nothing like her character in Yellowstone, but I knew she could do it the way it needed to be.”
Back in 2017 Reilly was ready to move back to England. She had been living in Manhattan with her husband Kyle, whom she married in 2012. (They now split their time between a home in New York and a cottage in the English countryside.) “I have always loved my job, but the business can sometimes present challenges that I didn’t feel I was cut out for,” she says. “I just wanted to go back to theater and do two or three plays a year, and live -quietly. That didn’t feel like a second prize. It felt like a choice, the life I wanted to have.”
Then she got the script for Yellowstone. “I remember reading it as I was packing up our apartment and thinking, Oh, shit. It was like laying down a bit of a gauntlet. The challenge of it pepped my interest.” Reilly then got on a call with showrunner Taylor Sheridan and was so passionate about the character that he gave her the part. “I didn’t even audition,” she says. “Then I was like, ‘Fuck, I didn’t audition.’ I was terrified, because I didn’t know how I was going to do it. And it took me a minute to find her.”
While some might dismiss Beth as a Freudian nightmare, many have come to appreciate her as what the Atlantic described as “that too rare figure in the world of prestige TV: an antihero who is also a woman.” Her complexities and flaws make her human. “It’s not just about playing strong, capable women,” Reilly says. “That’s missing the point. Male characters can be messy, but they can still be heroic. Full spectrum. And I think there is a bravery to embracing shadow. How can you be an honest person if you don’t own some of your darkness?”
Plus, the absolute fearlessness with which Beth exacts vengeance on her enemies provides a vicarious thrill like no other. Who hasn’t imagined telling off a toxic boss or beating the shit out of a misogynistic creep? “It’s a fantasy. But as in all fantasies, there is a little 10 percent that you can distill and inhabit. It shifts the energy a bit: how you own yourself, how you feel about yourself,” Reilly says. “I have definitely gotten more backbone in my life because of Beth. I didn’t know I could walk into a room and do that.” Not that she would, to be clear. But “I’m less afraid of a room.”
Sheridan, who was not available to comment for this story, had to shop Yellowstone around to several networks before one finally bit. As he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2023, TV execs (particularly one unidentified VP at HBO) worried that the show, which he was selling as “The Godfather in Montana,” was too “Middle America.” And they really had a problem with Beth. “Big mistake,” Reilly says with a laugh. “Huge.”
Since it premiered in 2018, Yellowstone has become the most popular scripted show on television (the first part of season five was the -second-most watched series in the country, bested only by Sunday Night Football). It has elevated Paramount Network to the major leagues of prestige TV and spawned a multiverse of prequels, sequels, and spin-offs, making Sheridan a very busy (and very rich) man in the process.
The irony now, of course, is that Yellowstone’s immense cultural impact has helped turn the American west, and Montana in particular, into the very thing the Duttons have shed so much blood to prevent. Land values have soared. Second home markets are booming. The superrich flood in to hone their -frontier skills on luxury dude ranches. The fantasy of the west is thriving across the country, too (see: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album, or Ralph Lauren’s 2024 fall/winter collection), as debates continue ad nauseam about Yellowstone’s alleged right-wing tilt. (Its mass appeal across the political spectrum speaks for itself.)
“I don’t participate in the noise in any way. I stay out of it. The only safe place for me is in the work—and then home with my husband. Very boring,” says Reilly, an avowed introvert who has long resisted playing by Hollywood’s rules. “It can become a cyclone of bullshit and fakeness, and I know I won’t find my worth in that.” The hysteria reached a fever pitch last year, when behind-the-scenes drama spilled out into the press, culminating in Costner’s exit from the show before filming began on its final episodes. Then, for a brief moment this summer, reports dangled the tantalizing prospect that this might not be the end of Yellowstone after all.
Reilly is okay with either outcome. “I loved this season. There were some really different territories to explore, so I’m not clinging to her. I’m happy to put her back in her padlocked box.” But she isn’t throwing away the key just yet. Rumors of a spin-off centered on Beth and Rip have been swirling for months, and though Reilly is mum on the details, she admits the prospect of a new narrative is enticing. “I am definitely interested in Beth, and who she is after some things have happened. Who is she in peace? As an actor you’re like, ‘Ooh, let me at that,’ ” she says. “Wouldn’t it be fun to watch Beth go to therapy?”
Photographs by Sebastian Kim
Styled by Melissa Ventosa Martin
Hair by Tim Muir. Makeup by Benjamin Puckey at A-Frame Agency. Nails by Kayo Higuchi for Chanel Le Vernis at Bryan Bantry Agency. Shot at Hook Studio, Brooklyn
In the Top Image: Kallmeyer blazer ($910) and trousers ($615); Ralph Lauren Collection sweater ($995); Van Cleef & Arpels clip and ring ($23,500)
On the Cover: Proenza Schouler dress; Nikos Koulis earrings; Belperron cuffs.
This story appears in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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