Kelly Reilly and Annette Bening are opening up about the emotional fractures at the center of Dutton Ranch, the latest chapter in the Yellowstone series.
For Reilly, stepping back into Beth Dutton’s world wasn’t really a return at all.
“It wasn’t like revisiting because I felt like I hadn’t stopped playing her because it was literally only a year,” Reilly said. “I knew that we were going to be doing it so I never let her go and then picked her up again in my mind.”
What interested her most this time around was figuring out who Beth becomes after the death of her father.
“The clue for me was in who is she now after her father’s death,” she said. “What gap does that leave in a person when you lose somebody you love so much when her reason to live was for somebody else and somebody else’s dream?”
Reilly said the ending of Yellowstone left lingering questions that carried directly into this new series.
“So once that all very poetically and beautifully got summed up and finished and finalized at the end of Yellowstone, I was left with a character who I wondered, who are you now?” she said. “Who are you after all of that?”
Beth may not have much time to sit in those emotions as she and Rip attempt to build a new life in Texas, but Reilly said the uncertainty remains embedded in the character.
“And so, the questions lingered in me, and I didn’t necessarily rush to answer them,” she said. “I think she’s trying to figure it out.”
Bening’s character, Beulah Jackson, is wrestling with many of those same emotional wounds.
“I’m a rancher. I inherited a ranch from my father very much like Beth, still wrapped up in my father who has been dead forever,” Bening said.
As Bening describes her, Beulah is a woman whose world is already unraveling.
“I think this is a woman who as we meet her, things are already falling apart and that’s why it’s good writing and it gave me something to play,” she said.
“Her ranch and her ranch world is fractured because she’s having trouble keeping it going like a lot of ranchers do in the present economy,” Bening continued. “She’s got two sons who one of whom is very much in trouble and she’s trying to make him okay.”
But underneath all of that is someone longing for connection and healing.
“She has tremendous heartbreak inside of her that she’s carried with her whole life, that she’s still trying to heal and trying to put back together desperately,” Bening said.
That emotional depth is what made the dynamic opposite Ed Harris especially compelling for her.
“That’s why this story with Ed Harris and knowing that Ed was going to play this part made it so interesting and potentially really interesting to me,” she said.
Alongside Kelly Reilly, Cole Hauser, Ed Harris and Annette Bening, Dutton Ranch also stars Finn Little, Juan Pablo Raba, Jai Courtney, J.R. Villarreal, Marc Menchaca and Natalie Alyn Lind.
The series premieres May 15 on Paramount+ with two episodes.