Josh Duhamel and Minka Kelly star as Staten Kirkland and Quinn O’Grady in Netflix’s Ransom Canyon. All episodes are now streaming, and this interview will contain spoilers for the first season.
Welcome to Ransom Canyon, where love, loss, and loyalty collide beneath the crimson mesas of Texas Hill Country. With three ranching family dynasties locked in a contest for control of the land, their lives and legacies are threatened by outside forces intent on destroying their way of life. At the center of it all is stoic rancher Staten Kirkland (Duhamel), who is healing from heartbreaking loss and on a quest for vengeance. Staten’s only glimmer of hope rests in the eyes and heart of Quinn O’Grady (Kelly), longtime family friend and owner of the local dancehall. But as the battle to save Ransom wages on, a mysterious cowboy drifts into town, dredging up secrets from the past. Vise tightening, Staten fights to protect the land he calls home, and the only love that can pull him back from the demons that haunt him.
“I think a big moment for me that maybe my or my character’s perspective changed was when she finally got to hear what she’s wanted to hear from him her whole life, which is, ‘Be with me,’ and she finally goes, ‘It’s too late,’” Kelly shared. “For her to have the strength to say no to the love of her life because she’s trying to do the right thing and she’s trying to pull herself out of this dysfunctional dynamic and away from this guy who just doesn’t seem to get his head out of his ass. No matter how hard she tries, no matter how hard she loves, no matter how much she’s there for him, she finally chooses something else, to choose differently, and I think that was a really cool moment that I really enjoyed about the show.”
“I think mine might be the end of episode one because he’s been so sort of caught up in this darkness of trying to — the grief that he’s been feeling, not properly dealing with it,” Duhamel expressed. “He sees Quinn for the first time other than somebody who’s just been a friend of the family, and just a real friend throughout this process, she’s been there for him. But for the first time, he sees her as something other than that, and when she throws it out there and says, ‘What do you even care,’ at the end of that first episode, he doesn’t know how to deal with it, and he says, ‘I don’t.’ It’s so like, ‘Oh dude, that’s not what you say,’ especially for somebody that you really care about. But he doesn’t, you know, that’s like, he’s just [a] typical closed-off guarded guy.”
We discussed the value of a show having three different generations of love stories, and which moment changed their perspective on the relationship between their characters.
Watch my interview below:
