There were times when Minka Kelly assumed that her acting career was over.
Kelly, 44, had never planned on becoming an actress. Before breaking out in her mid-20s as the sassy cheerleader Lyla Garrity in the football weeper “Friday Night Lights,” she worked as a scrub nurse. A decade ago, during a slow period, she graduated from culinary school.
So later, when fallow months turned into fallow years, she would tell herself this was fine. If Hollywood had finished with her, she would survive it.
But recently, having published a sensitive, unsparing memoir, “Tell Me Everything,” a New York Times best seller, Kelly found herself again in demand. An offer came for “Ransom Canyon,” a Netflix neo-western series with romance elements. Kelly would fill the cowboy boots of Quinn O’Grady, a concert pianist who runs a dance hall in the Texas Hill Country. Quinn’s enthusiasms include soap making, love triangles, looking wistful in prairie skirts.
Kelly didn’t think a romantic lead would be available to a woman in her 40s. But it was. And audiences have been enthusiastic: “Ransom Canyon,” based on the novel by Jodi Thomas, has been one of Netflix’s most popular shows since it debuted last week. And there is also more to come. After Kelly finished shooting “Ransom Canyon” in June, she flew to Paris to film her first romantic comedy, “Champagne Problems.” That movie will debut in November, also on Netflix.
“I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I am my best, and now the best thing has happened,” she said.
This was on a morning in mid-April, and Kelly was seated at the counter of Wick and Pour, a candle-making studio in Manhattan’s West Village. (Why candle making? Quinn makes soap. This felt close enough.) Diligently, Kelly poured a lavender and sage candle, then added a spoonful of glitter. “I love using my hands,” she said.
Kelly is, as the creator of “Ranson Canyon,” April Blair, said in a recent interview, “one of the most beautiful women in the business, if not the planet.” But that morning, dressed down in a white sweatshirt, she wore it casually. Soft-voiced and peaceable, she radiates a preternatural warmth and sympathy, a gratitude journal in human form.
That gratitude is hard-won. Kelly endured a turbulent childhood, which she details in “Tell Me Everything.” Maybe it’s a coincidence that roles like these are coming to her only now that she has reconciled herself to her past. Or, she sometimes thinks, this could be the universe rewarding her.
“Maybe I’ve suffered my whole life so that now in this part of my life I can enjoy it,” Kelly said.
In her first decade in the business, Kelly rarely discussed that past. “I thought it made me bad or unlovable or different or damaged,” she said. The daughter of a single mother who often supported herself as an exotic dancer, Kelly had a childhood that was itinerant and often unstable. As she recounts in her memoir, she watched her mother struggle with drugs and alcohol, and they were both physically abused by her mother’s long-term partner.
By her senior year in high school, Kelly was living alone in an Albuquerque apartment that she had paid for partly by performing in a peep show. After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles to be near her birth father, a guitarist who had once played with Aerosmith. She worked a series of low-wage jobs, and then with the support of a family friend who had married a sex doll magnate, she put herself through nursing school. She had also been scouted as a model, so for a while she spent her mornings in operating rooms, her afternoons at castings.
Those castings landed her a commercial agent. Commercials brought her bit parts. Bit parts got her an audition for “Friday Night Lights.” She was cast as Lyla, a rich girl with an easy, pony-tailed beauty.
Back then she had little formal training. Before emotional scenes, she would put headphones on and dig deep into her own pain. This was good for the camera, and in some ways it was good for her, too. Here, she could peel away her self-protection.
“The peeling is what’s addicting to me,” she said of acting. “The exposure and the rawness and the vulnerability.”
Zach Gilford was a co-star in those days. He could see how much of herself Kelly poured into her character. “She’s just so honest,” Gilford said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her lie. I don’t think she knows how.”
Slowly, role by role, Kelly developed a mellower process — imagining herself into a character’s circumstances rather than drawing on her own life. She had an arc on “Parenthood” and a short stint on “Euphoria.” She shot two episodes of “Drunk History.”
The actress Leighton Meester, who has known Kelly since their days doing commercials and later starred with her in “The Roommate,” has watched this evolution. “She’s blossomed and grown and become even more wise, but she was always incredibly kind,” Meester said. “She has always had this sparkly light.”
“Ransom Canyon,” which arrives nearly two decades after “Friday Night Lights,” was a measure of that personal and artistic growth. Blair, the creator, had been a “Friday Night Lights” fan. When she saw Kelly’s name on a list of potential Quinns, she thought, “That’s the person,” she said. “I want grown-up Lyla Garrity.”
Kelly immediately saw the parallels. “Like, this is Lyla 20, years later,” she said. She wanted that, too. The show would shoot in Albuquerque, where she had spent her teenage years, but now she would return there as an adult, a professional. And if the place unearthed difficult memories, that difficulty would power Quinn, who is, as Kelly put it, a woman still coming into her own power. Which is a nice way of saying that Quinn is pretty bad with men.
“The beauty of where I am now is that I can acknowledge and recognize where she is and have compassion for it, and so not judge her for not walking away from something that’s obviously unhealthy and confusing and painful,” Kelly said.
Josh Duhamel, who stars in “Ransom Canyon” as the rancher Staten Kirkland, a great candidate for therapy and one of the men Quinn shouldn’t date, appreciated how Kelly could elevate even soapy scenes. “She really did the work and stripped it away and made it feel real and raw,” he said.
For the role, Kelly spent up to eight hours each day practicing piano, and she learned how to adjust her riding to a Western saddle. (“They are such majestic spiritual creatures,” Kelly, who has participated in equine therapy, said of the show’s horses.) She also spent time with the young women in the cast, offering to rehearse with them, helping them advocate for themselves ahead of difficult scenes.
“She’s a mama bear,” Blair sad. “She brings everyone in.”
This care for others comes naturally to her. Extending that same grace to herself is something Kelly works at. When asked why she thought a rom-com hadn’t come her way before “Champagne Problems,” she suggested she had always wanted to do one but hadn’t deserved it.
“I wouldn’t have been able to really have enough to offer before,” she said. Then she gently corrected herself. “No,” she added. “That’s still my unhealed parts talking.”
Kelly has always had plenty to offer: sass, vulnerability, that sparkly light. She used to think that wasn’t sufficient, or that acting wasn’t really acting unless she tortured herself. Now, having starred in the top show on Netflix, she is trying to know better.
She decorated her candle with golden calendula and blue cornflowers, then sat back to admire it. “It’s OK to be joyful,” she said.
