Yellowstone Star Wes Bentley Explored Deep Space In A Beloved Sci-Fi Movie

Long before he became one of the core members of the Dutton family in the hit show "Yellowstone," Wes Bentley was trying hard to carve out a career in Hollywood by any means necessary. Early on, he popped up in Sam Mendes' timeless satire, "American Beauty," at the end of the '90s, starred alongside Heath Ledger in 2002's "The Four Feathers," and even played the villain to Nicolas Cage's Johnny Blaze in the contemptuous "Ghost Rider" in 2007. But his likely most prestigious role (which was perhaps the first significant boost to his growing fame) before his TV stardom came in Christopher Nolan's epic, 2014's "Interstellar."

In the beloved sci-fi, Bentley plays Doyle, a NASA geographer and crew member of the Endurance spacecraft alongside Matthew McConaughey's Cooper, Anne Hathaway's Dr. Amelia Brand, two robots, and another scientist, David Gyasi's Romilly. Together, they're sent to explore and colonize another planet in a mission that sees them travelling through a wormhole (which may be a real thing). However, not counting with the planet's dangerous nature and unique time restriction (known as gravitational time dilation), as Doyle and Brand set out to find the previous crew's ship and signal, they're soon faced with an escalating, gigantic tidal wave that puts their lives in jeopardy and sadly kills Doyle before he could return to the safety of their spaceship.

Though Bentley's supporting role is small and brief, it definitely put him on the radar of more viewers as well as filmmakers, ultimately helping him land various roles in bigger projects, including the one in "Yellowstone" that most people know him from.

Although Taylor Sheridan gave Bentley the biggest stage of his career thus far, it's somewhat strange how he went AWOL since the series ended in 2024 with its fifth season (without Kevin Costner). One could argue that the tiny supporting role in "Interstellar" did more for him in terms of bringing new opportunities than the show he's been a regular on for six years has.

During the "Yellowstone" years, the actor only appeared in a low-key biographical drama, "The Best of Enemies," alongside Sam Rockwell and Taraji P. Henson in 2019, and then lent his voice to the cyberpunk adult animation series, "Blade Runner: Black Lotus," which ran between 2021 and 2022. Interestingly, however, in the aftermath of "Yellowstone," he didn't have a single credit to his name whatsoever in the past two years.

That's about to change, though, since he's cast in Ryan Murphy's upcoming FX TV series, "The Shards," an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' autofiction-horror novel of the same name. The show will follow a group of teenagers in early '80s Los Angeles as they navigate life in the city while a mysterious serial killer dubbed the Trawler is also on the loose. For Bentley, this will be the second time working together with Murphy after playing various characters in the creator's "American Horror Story" series between 2014 and 2016.