Kelly Reilly Opens Up About "the Biggest Enemy" on Yellowstone
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Don't make me go Beth Dutton on you. In the vast world of Yellowstone merchandise , you can find this particular phrase emblazoned on t-shirts and hoodies, plastered on insulated cups, and etched into wine glasses. But while the audience may live for the vicarious thrill when Beth, the Machiavellian financier-cum-gubernatorial-chief-of-staff, gets the opportunity to verbally eviscerate boardroom opponents and hapless out of towners alike, for Kelly Reilly, who plays the lone Dutton daughter, Beth's takedowns are less of an exhilaration than a quandary.
"I don't go 'Oh yes, great,' I go, 'God, how am I gonna do this in a way that doesn't repeat?'" Reilly tells T&C, in her lilting British accent. (She admits that after years of living in the U.S. and playing Beth, she's picked up some American "tonality.")
"She lives off conflict," Reilly says of her character. "She has to feed off it. She gets energy from it."
If those easy wins feed Beth, who has clearly taken her father's edict to fight "everyone" to heart, it sounds as though she'll need them as the show carries on into its super-sized fifth season. "Later this season there are some really great episodes and moments where it may not be going her way, and she gets herself into a little bit of trouble, and it's out of her recklessness," Reilly reveals. "We get to see Beth squirm a bit, which is interesting to see how that plays out."
Of course, as fans of the show know, like any dangerous creature, Beth's at her most deadly when cornered, and there's no one in the Dutton family who gets her venom more than her brother Jamie. "He is the biggest enemy to her family, to her father, to the bunch. She believes that," says Reilly. "So you get those two things together, it's pretty combustible. In a weird way, at the beginning of this season, it's back to the bickering sort of siblings, but what's much deeper is underneath, being held at bay for a minute."
The past never stays buried for long, though, not with Beth, who Reilly describes as "haunted."
"Haunted by herself, haunted by her own actions, inactions maybe," Reilly says. "That's not something that you suddenly, over one season, just [get over and] find happiness. So I relate to the fact that there are things that she can't get over, even though I, Kelly, would love her to find peace with some things so she can maybe linger in some happiness."
She admits, "There is a version in my mind where her and Rip just go build a house together somewhere and live quietly. But right now, her world is pretty much on fire."
As for Rip, after seasons of setting Yellowstone fans' hearts aflutter, the epic romance between Beth and everyone's favorite ranch hand came to a head last season when they finally wed in a whirlwind ceremony on the Dutton lawn.
"I think she's always been devoted to Rip," Reilly explains. "I think there's an old fashioned quality to Beth, actually, that marrying him was really important. The wedding wasn't important. What she wore wasn't important, who was there wasn't important, but just being his wife. That is something that she would find truly powerful and important and would take very seriously. She is such a conundrum, that you can have such a reckless, fierce character, but actually what is important to her is family."
New episodes of Yellowstone debut Sunday nights on Paramount Network—find out all the details on how to stay caught up here.
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