‘Yellowstone’ Star Kelly Reilly’s One Courageous Act at 16 Got Her a Role in a Mega-hit Show

Actress Kelly Reilly is popularly known for portraying Beth Dutton on the neo-Western drama series Yellowstone alongside Kevin Costner, Luke Grimes, Wes Bentley, and more. The actress has been lauded for her performance on the show, especially after Costner exited the show and the focus shifted to Beth Dutton, whose ambition and fiery temper made her one of the most intriguing characters on the show.

The actress has also appeared in projects including the Sherlock Holmes movie, True Detective, A Haunting in Venice, and more. She is regarded as one of the most talented actresses in the industry currently. Kelly Reilly has shared about one of her earliest jobs and how she landed it, and it’s nothing but inspiring for anyone passionate about their career.

Kelly Reilly details how she landed up in Prime Suspect opposite Helen Mirren

British actress Kelly Reilly might be a successful and popular actress now, but she has had her share of struggles before reaching the point she is today. In her interview with The Independent, the Yellowstone actress shared that she was 16 years old when she wrote a letter to a woman who at the time ran an actor’s showcase in a bar just off Tottenham Court Road.

The actress revealed that in her letter she had asked the woman if she could perform a monologue, which she did, and the casting director of Prime Suspect, who was in the audience, was impressed. The casting director ended up offering her a small part in the movie opposite Helen Mirren. Reilly, who had never been in front of the camera, was going to act alongside Mirren, and she mentioned,

I wasn’t a natural performer. I was very introverted and very shy. It came out of just an absolute need—I really wanted to be an actor. I really wanted that to be my life.

Kelly Reilly, at the age of 26, was nominated for an Olivier Award for her work on After Miss Julie, followed by Othello. By the time the actress reached 30, she noted that playing tragic women onstage exhausted her, and she didn’t know how to separate herself at that point from the characters she was playing.

The actress then moved to New York and not only booked a movie with Denzel Washington (Flight) but also met her now-husband, Kyle Baugher, who also happens to be a co-executive producer on the Yellowstone spin-off series 1883.

Kelly Reilly gets candid about playing Beth Dutton on Yellowstone

The actress, further in her conversation with the publication, noted that there are some days when she plays Beth Dutton on-screen, and she loves and admires her, and then she envies her. But there are some days when the character feels sick to her stomach, and she has to remind herself that it’s just fiction and heightened.

Reilly mentioned that she has made herself understand that she is not Beth Dutton. But it’s a character that is very rarely written for women where the woman is like a loyal son to her father, and she is fearless. Beth gets her father’s girlfriend arrested, blackmails her brother, and almost kills a man. Talking about that, she added,

There is something refreshing about seeing a woman be so unapologetic about that. Men get to do it all the time in fiction. They’re the heroes. When a woman gets to do it, she is just a b**ch, or she’s a s**t, or she’s whatever. And I don’t see her like that.

Reilly says she sees Beth Dutton as nuanced as she sees herself or most of her female friends. The actress is not fond of social media, and one would rarely find her talking about her personal life. She mentioned that she never wanted to be famous; she wanted to be an actor to disappear into work and to be a stage actress, but life had other plans.

With Beth Dutton, Kelly Reilly is known to be one of the most talented actresses who is now the talk of the town and probably the most-watched woman on television.

Yellowstone is streaming on Paramount+.