It turns out Annette Bening was a “Yellowstone” fan long before she was cast in “Dutton Ranch” (now streaming on Paramount+), the latest spinoff of the mainline show, where she plays Beulah Jackson, the villainous owner of a ranch and slaughterhouse that borders the Texas ranch that Rip (Cole Hauser) and Beth (Kelly Reilly) have just purchased.
“I watched it and I thought it was really a great series and completely involving and original and deeply felt; incredibly well written, well acted,” Bening said.
In particular, when Bening watched “Yellowstone,” she was taken by her future co-star Reilly, as the tempestuous daughter of rancher John Dutton III (Kevin Costner).
“I thought, Where did she come from? And then I found out she was English. I was like, Are you kidding?” Bening said.
When she was approached for “Dutton Ranch,” Bening said she was intrigued.
“I wanted to hear the story. And they told me the story, and I thought it sounded like a lot of fun. It sounded like an adventure in Texas, which it became, and that it was Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser, who I had been watching for decades. And thought, Oh yeah, OK,” Bening said. “What they had done in ‘Yellowstone,’ the two of them, was so powerful. And then they told me Ed Harris was going to be doing it. It was all of this intriguing story stuff together with all of those people.”
One of the defining traits of Beulah is her ensemble – Beth calls her a “grizzly in Gucci” early in the season and every outfit that Bening gets to wear is embroidered, bedazzled and big as life. (You half expect her to show up in some scene sporting the UFO suit that Steven Yeun wore in “Nope.”)
“I was a little bit ignorant about the level of bling that can happen in a Texas ranch woman’s world. I really enjoyed this part of the Texas culture. I’m playing a rancher. Some ranchers, they’re not into all of that. They just have work to do, and they get it done, and they dress accordingly, except for maybe a rodeo or a fancy party,” said Bening. “But I think Beulah is a woman who enjoys her bling – the diamonds, the turquoise, the fringe, the sequins, all of it. She’s into that. It’s very much a part of the culture in a beautiful way. And I enjoyed this part of the character as well.”
There’s a beautiful moment between Bening’s Beulah and Harris’ kindly veterinarian Everett McKinney, who soon falls in with the Dutton Ranch gang after helping Beth save an injured horse. It happens in Friday’s episode (“Act of God Business”), when Beulah invites Everett to “sit a minute” (a note-perfect Texas phrase that Bening delivers authentically). When Everett eventually leaves, rebuffing her advances, Beulah, a character who up until this point has been made of chiseled marble, breaks down into tears.
“He’s a great actor, and he tells the truth,” Bening said of Harris. “And when you have someone like that to work opposite, it all becomes easier, because really, it’s a responding, reactive art anyway, but then that just becomes all the more obvious when you have someone like that to work opposite.”
Bening felt the scene illuminated “an important part of the exploration of this woman.”
“She has all of this power and need to control and business acumen, which, by the way, is all falling apart as the show begins. It’s not going well, so that’s an interesting problem, but the longing for love and the longing for romance and the loneliness that she feels in her world, I love that I get to explore that. That means a lot to me to be able to play a woman of my age who’s longing for romance and connection and intimacy. And the fact that it was with Ed just made it all the more enticing.”
For Bening, it was important that her “Dutton Ranch” character not just be an out-and-out villain; that she has layers and that you can understand her as a human being and not a two-dimensional foil.
“We all do what we have to do and when you have good writing, then hopefully you can find and dig into what’s underneath, why people need to control and feel, in Beulah’s case, control the town, control the ranch, the family,” Bening said. “She feels an incredible sense of responsibility towards her father, who left her the ranch, and she was really raised in that world of, it’s going to be yours and you’re going to have to take over. And now it’s all kind of slipping through her fingers in a devastating way, and she’s not able to live in the way that she had hoped. She doesn’t live up to what she hoped she would live up to for her dad. I think that causes her a lot of pain.”
What makes the character even more fascinating, especially for longtime “Yellowstone” fans, is the parallels between Bening’s character and Costner’s John Dutton III. They both lost their spouses and both create a found family, with both biological children and those that they have welcomed in.
They also both blur the line between being a parent and being something closer to a mafia don, concealing dangerous transgressions in order to keep the train on the tracks. Bening said that the parallels between Beulah and John were talked about, along with certain parallels to Beth.
“Absolutely. It is a similar kind of thing. And that also, like Beth, Beulah, feels this enormous responsibility to her dad, and that that’s part of what is so painful and excruciating about the conundrum she finds herself in with the ranch and how things are going badly,” Bening said.
When we asked how her expectations of “Dutton Ranch” aligned with the experience of shooting the first season, Bening responded exactly how you’d probably expect.
“I know how to fight for a character, that’s what I’m in this for, and to find the other colors underneath the obvious and wanting as much as I could to be of service to the whole story. Both Kelly Reilley and Cole Hauser, as executive producers, they were very much involved in the shaping of the narrative. But if you don’t have a good narrative, I don’t care about the characters, you can’t really make a story,” Bening said. “Character is plot. And I hope that we fashioned a storyline that people just can’t help but watch.”
As to whether or not Bening will be back for additional seasons of “Dutton Ranch,” which is all but guaranteed to be picked up for future seasons, she said she tries not to think about it.
“I’m more kind of in the moment in terms of what’s happening and what I can do, and I’m still able to do films and other things. And so however things unfold, I think I’ll be able to just go with the flow,” Bening said. “But having said that, the investment in it for me is a lot. And wanting to emotionally invest in this woman and in this story means a lot to me and meant a lot to me.”
“Dutton Ranch” is streaming on Paramount+ now.
The post Annette Bening on Finding Her Flamboyant ‘Dutton Ranch’ Villainess: ‘A Woman Who Enjoys Her Bling’ appeared first on TheWrap.
