Kelly Reilly Wants You to Know Dutton Ranch Is Ed Harris's Show Now

Kelly Reilly is not waiting for season 2 to tell fans what to expect. She wants to make it clear right now.

"This is not the Beth and Rip show," Reilly told TV Insider this week, shortly after the Dutton Ranch season 1 finale landed on Paramount+ on July 3. "This is Dutton Ranch, and there's four lead characters."

That fourth main character — the one who, was mostly kept in the background during the first season — is Ed Harris. Harris plays Everett McKinney, a local vet who started dating Annette Bening's character, Beulah, in the penultimate episode, then largely stepped back as the finale took shape around Beth and Rip. Reilly and her co-star Cole Hauser both say that balance is about to change.

"He's such an amazing American actor that I think was used very sparingly this year," Hauser, 51, said. "We're going to make sure that he is a big part of helping us moving forward in whatever capacity."

Reilly, 48, put it more directly: "I think season 2 is going to feel very much more Ed's show."

Harris is 75 and has not done much TV work. That he came to Dutton Ranch at all — alongside Bening, 68, a two-time Oscar winner who had also not been a regular presence on the small screen — is something the cast has not stopped talking about since before the show premiered in May. Reilly's framing has stayed consistent: "We could have just been a little soapy spinoff and we're not because of them. We're a drama, we're a new show, and it's got some heavyweights in it."

Bening, for her part, described the dynamic on set with a clarity that neither of her co-stars quite matched. "You're really only as good as who you're acting with," she told PEOPLE. "With great actors like Ed Harris, Kelly Reilly, Cole Hauser — really, it's about listening and looking at what they're doing and picking up on that energy. That's the fun of it — the exchange and the uncertainty of what might happen."

She and Harris have history. They starred together in the 2013 film The Face of Love, and Bening said that familiarity mattered. "The fact that we have this long history, and that it's Ed. I know Ed, we'd worked together before. He's so compelling as an actor and as a person."

Hauser said working with Harris was something he had wanted for years. "The opportunity and honor to work with Ed was a dream come true. He's just as good of a person as he is an actor. And Annette is wild and fun and smart."

Season 2 was renewed in June, before the finale aired. We will have to wait for season 2 to see if Harris’s bigger role will make him the main focus of the drama, as Reilly promises, or if the show will keep focusing mostly on Beth and Rip.

Dutton Ranch season 1 is streaming now on Paramount+.