‘Yellowstone’ Star Kelly Reilly Talks Most ‘Heartbreaking’ Moment of ‘Intense’ Season 4

Yellowstone recently wrapped up its fourth season, earning more fans and high ratings for Paramount Network and shifting the world of the Duttons just a bit more. It was a roller-coaster season that ended with less bang than the prior season. That doesn’t mean the ramifications won’t make their presence known or that the quality had slipped. It just means Yellowstone is prepared to deliver and surprise as it moves forward to its conclusion.

Season four left all the Dutton family feeling their wounds, but it was Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton that seemed to walk out of the flames to accept the darker part of her life. The finale saw Beth placed on the edge of exile from the family before getting married in a wild moment of happiness to counter “the darkest thing she’s ever done” shortly after.

It was an intense season for Reilly, but the most heartbreaking moment might also be the simplest. While Beth was caught in an explosion, emotionally beaten over the season, married the man of her dreams before blackmailing her estranged brother, the hardest moment was the glimmer of motherhood she had to choke back.

Season four introduced Carter to the Dutton family, found by Beth outside of a hospital and brought back to the ranch. There is a moment where the two are getting closer and the young boy calls Beth “mama,” prompting her to begin a motherly response she quickly kills in its tracks.

“When his eyes are filling with tears and I’m being mean to him, it’s so upsetting and it’s so impossible because it’s the opposite of who I am,” Reilly tells Esquire. “So in that moment, I think she knows how to handle it. She’s about to go kill someone and ruin her life. She isn’t going to tell that kid, “I will be your mother,” even if her heart wants that more than anything, because she could abandon him again. When I read it, and when I was playing it in my head, there was a few things happening, one of them being she was protecting him from her, and being truthful about the fact that you only get one. I’m not your mother, I’m your friend.”

“It’s not like they’re writing on a f-ing napkin going, “Here you are everyone, life’s neatly well done. You can’t have kids, here I’m going to give you one and have a little, happy family.” That’s not Yellowstone, and it’s not real life. These are really complicated, difficult, flawed characters who have had despicable, awful, painful childhoods, trying to understand what a kid needs in that moment?” Reilly continued. “We both took the scene as it was intended and written. I think that it was powerful, because the payoff when one day that relationship may or may not become something really earned, is going to be stunning.”

In the end, Beth Dutton ended her season far from being a mother but close to being a matriarch. And that’s a powerful role to be in within the confines of the series.