KELSEY ASBILLE BRINGS HEART TO THE NEO-WESTERN SERIES 'YELLOWSTONE'

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Among the precocious, it’s common to find a well-planned path to world domination. The actress Kelsey Asbille, twenty-six, doesn’t subscribe to that modus operandi. “I’ve learned that never works out,” she says, laughing.

Whatever Asbille is doing instead appears to be functioning. So far, she’s found roles in One Tree Hill and The Amazing Spider-Man; hit the Disney circuit in Pair of Kings; dabbled in comedy via the spoof TV trailer Chicago Sanitation; and gone viral in the music video for “Girls Like Girls,” the queer pop singer Hayley Kiyoko’s 2015 ode to female attraction. Born and raised in South Carolina, Asbille first entered acting by way of community theater when she starred in a production of Ragtime at age eleven. “Everyone had nine-to-five jobs and would work till one at night because they truly loved it,” she recalls. “They had so much passion for it.” That passion, which she calls “contagious,” is still what draws her in today.

But Asbille doesn’t take the direct route up the mountain; she’d rather ride the scenic, but likely more enriching, road to the top. A few years ago, she started an undergraduate degree at Columbia University in human rights; she alternates semesters with filming and jokes that her sister, who is eight years younger, will likely finish before her. Since then, she has also managed to find two roles that overlap with her major in indigenous rights: the 2017 film Wind River and the new Kevin Costner-led TV series Yellowstone, both directed by Taylor Sheridan.

Both works fall within the rough genre of contemporary Western. There are lone riders, incidents where dubious moral decisions must be made, and sweeping odes to the surreally desolate landscapes of the Rocky Mountains. More significantly, they open up the conversation on the Native American experience. In Wind River, for which Sheridan won an award in Cannes’s Un certain regard Best Director category (given to filmmakers who explore less traditional forms of storytelling), Asbille haunts the screen briefly as Natalie, a Native American girl whose brutal disappearance provides the catalyst for the plot. The audience finds out later she was raped and murdered and a title card at the end points out that missing persons statistics are kept for every demographic group in the United States except for Native American women.

In contrast, Asbille’s role in Yellowstone sheds light on the more mundane, but equally real, difficulties of reservation culture. She plays Monica, a Native American woman who lives on an unnamed Indian reservation (the scenes were shot on the Crow Nation reserve in Montana). She is married to Kayce Dutton, whose father (played by Costner) owns the largest ranch in the United States, which abuts the reservation, placing Monica and Kayce in the Romeo and Juliet-esque position of linking two families that are at odds with each other. When seen together in the pilot episode though, they are doing universally relatable activities: cooking dinner, worrying about money, teaching their elementary school-aged son to understand the world (although Kayce, away from Monica, manages to find himself in enough drama of his own). Throughout this, Asbille imbues Monica with a casual, friendly veneer, but her attitude is underscored by a maternal instinct that Kayce’s father and any of the other characters in Yellowstone would be fools to fight with. “Family is so paramount to her and she loves Kayce so much,” says Asbille of her character. The question as the series develops is: How much can she take? “That’s something that’s interesting as the season goes on, seeing what she’s able to accept.”

Asbille plays Monica as someone who knows what it’s like to go through an internal struggle, particularly when it comes to identity. The actress, who is part Cherokee on her mother’s side (her father is Chinese and some of her previous acting credits were under the name Kelsey Chow), has received some criticism for playing Native American characters—the Saulteaux First Nations actor Adam Beach has called on other Native American actors to stay away from Yellowstone over perceived “redwashing”—to which Asbille responds, “In terms of identity, mixed race identity, and talking about identity that falls outside traditions, it’s a confusing process and at least I’m in good company.” Asbille does not take her heritage lightly—she learns Cherokee online, in a structured course provided by the Cherokee Nation, and she has a tutor to teach her Mandarin. “We’re kind of the black sheep in the family,” she says, abashedly. “We’re the only ones in the family who can’t speak Chinese.” But she acknowledges that it’s a process: “I just went to China for the first time at twenty-five and meeting some of my family there was a learning experience. As you get older, you learn what it is that defines you.” She points out, positively, that at the very least conversations about these topics are happening and she appreciates cinema’s role in sparking the discussion. “The exploration can be painful, but in the end, I think it’s a blessing.”

Despite her progress towards her degree, it’s unlikely that Asbille will quit acting soon. “I love cinema, I’m such a nerd about it,” she says. As her language skills improve—we joke that our next interview will be in Cantonese or Mandarin—she says that she would eventually like to act in international roles. In the meantime, she’s enjoying the ride. “I think the magic with acting is when you’re so involved in a story that everything else kind of disappears. Sometimes you get there and sometimes you don’t, but I always approach it with an open mind,” she says. “It’s fun to allow what happens to happen and to see where that takes you.”

Yellowstone premieres Wednesday on Paramount Network.