The actress tells The Hollywood Reporter that she is “energized by her irreverence, danger, recklessness, but also her pain” in a candid interview about her character on the hit Paramount Network series.
The latest Yellowstone episode contains a scene in which viewers are likely holding their breath while watching Beth Dutton.
It’s not the first time this has happened on Taylor Sheridan’s hit neo-Western saga, but the operatic feud between Dutton siblings Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Jamie (Wes Bentley) nearly reached a tragic climax in “Horses in Heaven.”
Jamie came this close to intentionally running over Beth with his car after a relationship-altering argument in the fourth episode of the fifth season, which follows Kevin Costner’s Montana cattle rancher John Dutton as he becomes Montana governor.
“I have the luxury of saying Taylor Sheridan’s words, which are weapons — sometimes prayers, sometimes screams,” Reilly says of her one-of-a-kind character on the hit Paramount Network show.
“It’s difficult to describe or sum up Beth.
I could go on and on about her.
She’s easily the most intriguing character I’ve ever played.
She certainly takes up a lot of space in my mind.”
Beth Dutton has carved a name for herself in television history.
Given the trauma she bears and the vengeance she exacts for the benefit of her father and the Yellowstone ranch, the Dutton family’s only daughter has been described as ruthless yet unbreakable.
Reilly claims she was drawn to the character because she had never read anyone like her before.
“Complicated, um.”
“I’d probably start there,” she says of herself.
“It took a long time for me to access her and fully understand her,” she says.
“Many hours before we started filming in season one, I would just be on the phone with Taylor, listening to him.”
I must have three notebooks full of notes about his perception of her and her history.”
Sheridan, who is working on Yellowstone spinoffs and prequels, is well-versed in the Dutton family and the fictional world he created, and Reilly says she gained a visceral understanding of Beth from their conversations and reading the first few episodes.
“I’d never read a character like her before, and I was energized by her irreverence, danger, and recklessness, as well as her pain.”
“He draws that really well,” she says.
“And I knew that in order for her to inhabit all of that, for her to resonate or command any kind of emotional response, those notes had to be equal in her.”
I think she’s a tornado.
She’s the weather.
And something about her is so unapologetic that it must be a fantasy, right?
We couldn’t get away with speaking like she does or doing some of the things she does.
So it’s a heightened reality of, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just say what I think sometimes?”
Jamie’s nearly hit-and-run attack on Beth is etched in the Dutton siblings’ history.
But the hatred resurfaces when Beth, who has just been arrested for impulsively and violently assaulting a woman at a bar for hitting on her husband Rip (Cole Hauser), is driven home from jail by her Attorney General brother and notices a toddler’s car seat in Jamie’s car.
While viewers are aware that Jamie is the father of a young boy, he has kept this information from his family.
And the betrayal enrages Beth, who wonders how fate could have given him a son after what he did to her when they were teenagers.
“You had my womb removed and God gave you a boy?”
she asks, her voice shaking with rage and shock, recalling how, as a scared and pregnant teen, she turned to her brother for assistance, and he, in turn, took her to a hysterectomy clinic instead of an abortion clinic, and without her consent.
Beth hits her brother in the car and nearly knocks them off the road.
When Jamie tells Beth that taking her to that clinic is his greatest regret, she promises to deprive him of fatherhood: “You can kiss [your son] goodbye because he’s as good as gone the next time you see him.”
That’s when Jamie gets back into the car and lets out a scream he’s been suppressing since his sister began blackmailing him over his season four finale choice, in which he murdered his biological father to save himself.
He accelerates his car towards Beth, getting close enough that if she hadn’t stepped aside at the last second, he would have hit her.
“Beth didn’t have a choice,” Reilly says of the trauma that has driven Beth’s hatred for her brother since the show’s inception.
“This is a character who was a teen when she became pregnant, and she was unable to seek help from her father, and her mother is no longer alive.”
She was afraid of embarrassing or disappointing her father, so she went to Jamie, who made a terrible mistake because he didn’t want word of the high-ranking John Dutton’s [daughter having an abortion] getting out, so he took her to a place where nobody would know about it, and she trusted him and made a terrible, awful, tragic mistake.”
In season three, the event was revealed in flashbacks, finally explaining the long-simmering tension between the two siblings.
And, despite the fact that everyone can see their hatred, especially Beth’s for Jamie, Beth has never told anyone what Jamie did.
“She avoids discussing what happened for a variety of reasons.”
“One of them would be she knows Rip would kill him,” Reilly says, delving into Beth’s mind.
“But it’s not just that.”
Something about this secret is connected to [their mother’s death].”
The Dutton family matriarch (played by Gretchen Mol) died in a horse riding accident while out with a young Beth and her other living brother, Kayce, as has also been explored in flashbacks (Luke Grimes).
Beth’s mother wrongfully blamed Beth for the horse bucking and then falling on her mother, and Beth has always blamed herself for her mother’s death.
“I actually think Jamie blames Beth for their mother’s death — and Beth blames herself,” Reilly explains.
“But, more importantly, I’d say [about their relationship], Beth believes Jamie is the greatest potential threat to her father.”
He’s already demonstrated it several times.
And if there’s anything worth killing or removing Jamie for, it’s if he threatens — or re-threatens — her father and the ranch.”
When it comes down to it, does Reilly believe Beth has what it takes to kill her brother, as she has threatened?
“That’s a good question; I’ll think about it,” she says.
“When I’m in the depths of her hatred, rage, and pain, yes.”
That strong and painful for her.
But I’m not sure.
She had the chance to do it, but she didn’t.”
The cast of Yellowstone has praised Sheridan for addressing real-world issues in the Dutton family drama, and Reilly emphasizes how Beth’s story — which is also now airing in a post-Roe v. Wade America — highlights a harsh reality of what was happening to Native women in the 1970s and 1980s.
She hopes that by exploring the complicated trauma Beth is dealing with, she will find solace in knowing that her choice of being able to carry a child was taken away from her.
“The tragedy in this story for me is that hysterectomies were performed on young Native girls and women who were going in to have their tonsils or appendix removed.”
“They were forced into sterilization without their consent,” she claims.
“This happens to Beth, this obviously privileged white girl, but it happens to Native women all the time.”
Taylor emphasizes many Native American and Indigenous stories and themes in the show, and he blames it on Beth.
And, from a psychological standpoint, Beth believes it is unforgivable.
And the fact that it was her brother who made this decision — whether it was out of ignorance, youth, stupidity, or something darker, we don’t know — Beth considers it a huge betrayal, and she’s not one who has come to terms with it.”