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If Minka Kelly isn’t the current reigning Queen of Netflix, she’s certainly in the royal court. The first season of her Texas-set series Ransom Canyon was a huge success: It spent four weeks in the global top 10 list and reached the top 10 in 77 countries. Netflix immediately ordered a second season, which Kelly is currently filming in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she grew up.
This month also marks the release on the streamer of Kelly’s first ever rom-com, Champagne Problems. In the holiday romp, Kelly, an effortlessly young 45, plays Sydney Price, an American executive who flies to Paris to execute a takeover of Chateau Cassell, a family-owned Champagne house. Of course, on her first night there, she has an epic date with a man who turns out to be the heir to the company after a meet-cute at a French bookstore. (Art imitates life imitates art: Kelly’s own first stop in Paris is usually Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore on the Left Bank.)
With its musings on Ratatouille, swoonworthy scenes of the City of Lights around Christmas and equally swoonworthy romance, Champagne Problems goes down like, yes, a glass of bubbly.
“I’ve always wanted to do a rom-com, and Paris is my favorite place in the world, so when the script came, I said, ‘Great, I’d love to,’” recalls Kelly. “To think I would get to do a rom-com in France, that was very exciting. It’s such a nice breath of fresh air. We laughed all day.”
During filming in Paris, Kelly rented a flat in the Marais. “For me, it’s all about food, and I ate a lot,” says Kelly, who only speaks a little bit of French. “I love to go out to eat by myself, especially when I’m out on the road. I go exploring and watch this culture happen around me.”
One of her favorite haunts is Chez Janou on Rue Roger Verlomme. “Whenever anyone is going to Paris, I always send them there. I just love how French it is. They’re famous for their chocolate mousse that comes in this huge bowl, and they just come over and lop it on the plate,” she says. “I’d order this delicious beef stew and an entire baguette with salted butter and a glass of wine, and I’d just sit and eat at the bar and watch all the waiters be so lively. The whole French people being rude thing—I haven’t experienced that.”
In addition to the time spent in her favorite city, making the movie “was everything I’d hoped it would be,” says Kelly. “I’m a bit of a goofball, and I got to let loose and let my personality show. It was nice to be silly. It was a really nice respite from being on a drama and being so emotional.”
Of course, Kelly is talking about Ransom Canyon, in which her character, Quinn O’Grady, a concert pianist who moves home to Texas to run a dance hall, pines for Staten Kirkland, played by Josh Duhamel. It’s a pivotal love triangle that has made the show a hit. But Kelly also could be talking about Tell Me Everything, the memoir she released in 2023 that chronicles her complicated relationship with her mother, a stripper who struggled with drug addiction.
Originally, Kelly wanted to tell that story as a movie in the vein of grounded family dramas like Thirteen and The Florida Project. She wrote it as a screenplay, which she planned to direct, and the prolific Simon Kinberg was going to help produce. Though she wasn’t sure if she would star as her mother onscreen, “I was going to get it made,” Kelly says. She started talking to line producers to develop a budget. But just as things were becoming real, the pandemic hit.
“Everything went away,” explains Kelly. A few people told her that there was so much more to her story—moving to Hollywood; her initial plans to be a nurse; booking her breakthrough role on Friday Night Lights—that she should reconceive it as a book. Tell Me Everything was a cathartic experience. It became a New York Times bestseller and thrust Kelly, whose career had quieted a bit, back into the spotlight.
“Sometimes, once you get clear, healthy and happy again, things can flow back in line,” Kelly says. Publishing the book “changed my life.”
For one thing, it opened the door to Ransom Canyon. “It’s about relationships and beautiful landscapes, the horses and the ranches. There’s a real nostalgia to even the aesthetics of the show,” Kelly explains, when asked why she thinks Ransom has connected with audiences. “Everyone can relate to these family dynamics and heartache and not being able to get out of your own way when you’re trying to make a relationship work.”
To play Quinn, Kelly had to learn to play piano. Now she can share her musical know-how with her real-life boyfriend, Dan Reynolds, lead singer of the band Imagine Dragons. “I’ve been to so many of his shows, and they’re an emotional experience,” she says. “When he’s playing new music at home, I just can’t get enough of it.”
Season 2 of Ransom Canyon will have eight episodes instead of 10 and “more levity,” she explains. Filming in Albuquerque reminds her of her complicated childhood, of course, but things now couldn’t be more different. “I’ve never seen more beautiful sunsets,” she says. “It’s breathtaking every single day.”
She spends a lot of time on her own there. “I’ve made a lot of peace with being alone, and I actually enjoy it.” But it means being left alone with her thoughts, too, which occasionally drift to where she is in her career.
“I feel so lucky to have been doing this for 20 years. It’s crazy,” Kelly says. “It’s one of the hardest businesses to support yourself in, especially coming from where I came from. I started so green.”
And now she’s risen to be among the Netflix crème de la crème. “But more importantly, I know my worth now,” she says. “I feel like I do belong.”
Hair: Ricky Fraser
Makeup: Diane Buzzetta
Photo Assistants: Dante Guerra and Maya Sacks
Styling Assistant: Grace Olyphant
Photographed on location at Netflix Studios in Los Angeles