This season of Yellowstone, we're introduced to another in a long line of Dutton enemies. This time, it's not a high-powered CEO or anyone else looking to pave the Montana paradise to put up a parking lot (or an airport). Nope, this time it's an animal activist who's introduced at a protest where she proceeds to throw rocks at Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) only to be bailed out of jail by John Dutton (Kevin Costner) after her arrest.
Summer Higgins, played by Piper Perabo, is already shaking up the Yellowstone ranch status quo. She spends the night at John's house (to the ire of Beth Dutton) and even stays the next morning for one of the most uncomfortable breaktast table scenes in recent memory.
Perabo previously starred in the 2000 cult classic Coyote Ugly, as well as Cheaper By the Dozen and Cheaper By the Dozen 2, Imagine Me & You, Perfect Opposites, Because I Said So, The Prestige, Angel Has Fallen and the TV series Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and Covert Affairs, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination. She recently appeared on The Big Leap.
Wide Open Country caught up with Perabo to talk about walking onto the Yellowstone set as a fan, why John Dutton and Summer aren't really that different after all and that intense breakfast scene at the Dutton house.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
I read that you were already a fan of Yellowstone before joining the cast. What was it like to step into this world as a fan?
Weird, because [usually] when you go to set and it's a soundstage, the sets don't really make sense — how they're laid out....It's not logical. The Dutton ranch is on a real ranch. It's a real place. So when you drive up this dirt road and over this hill, all of a sudden there is Yellowstone. There are the barns, there is the bunkhouse, and it's all laid out the way you think. When you walk into the barn, there's the barn that you see all those scenes in, you know? So as a fan, it's really cool that it exists. A lot of shows are fake, but this is a real place.
I loved seeing Summer and John connect. I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't expecting them to find common ground.
I like that. I didn't expect it when I got the scripts and I was sort of pleasantly surprised that what John kind of realizes is, although they're both kind of coming at it from different sides, they have a similar view of the world in a way. They're trying to protect the land. Summer, I think sort of foolishly, comes into Montana not really knowing about ranching and that way of life. So John opens her eyes to this whole world that she didn't know anything about.
I had never been to Montana until I went for Yellowstone. It's one of those places that really moves you. It's not just the big sky, although I don't know how it's possible that Montana has bigger sky than everywhere else, but it does. Even being on the Yellowstone ranch, there was one morning that I got up for a run and I was running on one of the dirt roads on the edge of the ranch. There were all these elk moving across the field. I just thought, "this place would move anybody."
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We've already kind of seen John Dutton and the Dutton family showing Summer their way of life. Can we expect Summer to change the Dutton family's outlook at all?
Summer's not ready to change all the way. So she's going to bring what she's fighting for into this relationship with the Duttons. It doesn't work for everyone, but it's the conversation that I think is so cool. In [episode 6 of season 4], when Beth and Summer are across the able from each other, it doesn't go great...but I feel like that is the way forward for people to understand each other is to sit at a table with families and talk. So it's going to take more than one meal at the Dutton house to change anything, obviously. Meals at the Dutton house often go wrong. But I like that Summer is at least bold enough to start the conversation.
Summer really held her own with Beth. Not a lot of people can do that. Can you talk about working opposite Kelly Reilly?
It was so fun. And I think not enough shows have scenes where powerful women go up against each other. Some do, and we're getting more, but I think it's really cool that a show like Yellowstone, where you think it's so male in a way, this cowboy world....Although there's a lot of great — Teeter [Jennifer Landon] is one of my favorite characters on television — but I thought it was cool of Taylor [Sheridan] to write this conflict between Beth and Summer and to see where it goes as a fan of the show. It's the kind of thing that I would be interested in watching.
