Minka Kelly Thought Hollywood Was Done With Her—Then Came Netflix’s ‘Ransom Canyon’

Minka Kelly admits she was ready to hang up her Hollywood hat before Netflix’s Ransom Canyon came calling. In a recent interview, the 44-year-old actress candidly shared that she’d often questioned if her acting days were done, saying, “I thought that so many times.” For someone who’s been lighting up screens since her Friday Night Lights days, you wouldn’t expect her to be thinking about scrubbing in for surgery instead of stepping in front of the camera. But for Kelly, the backup plan was always real—she considered returning to her pre-fame career as a scrub tech in the OR. Talk about keeping it practical in Tinseltown.

On Ransom Canyon, Kelly plays Quinn O’Grady, a musician and dance hall owner caught in a classic love triangle with two feuding ranchers, played by Eoin Macken and Josh Duhamel. Small-town drama, big heart—Netflix knows the formula. Kelly said this gig is her favorite yet, and after two decades in the business, that’s saying something. She credits her newfound contentment to life experience and, as she put it, “maybe just being a woman in her 40s.”

Despite her success, Kelly admits she still thinks about returning to the operating room “all the time.” The confidence she found in that world helps balance out the highs and lows of acting. “This isn’t the whole world, so the rejection that you get being an actor is sort of balanced out for me in that I can go, ‘I’m good at this’ and I loved it so much,” she said. Considering how Hollywood can chew people up and spit them out, having a plan B that involves actual scalpels isn’t the worst idea.

Filming Ransom Canyon took Kelly back to her roots in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which she admitted was “scary” at first. But once she was back, she realized it wasn’t so bad after all. For Kelly, the return was especially poignant. In her 2023 memoir, Tell Me Everything, she opened up about her turbulent childhood—growing up with a single mother who worked as an exotic dancer, visiting strip clubs as a kid, experiencing abuse, and even working in peep shows as a teen to make ends meet. Revisiting Albuquerque to work on the show felt, as she put it, like a “surreal and beautiful way to sort of put a bow on that whole story.”

Now, with more “grown-up, more healed eyes,” Kelly says she has compassion for her younger self and can finally appreciate the beauty of New Mexico—something she missed when life was all about survival. It’s a full-circle moment that reminds us: sometimes Hollywood really does love a comeback story, especially when the leading lady finds her power both on and off screen.