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 later this year, 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 “Ransom 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.
