'Ransom Canyon' star thought Hollywood career was over before landing Netflix role

"Ransom Canyon" star Minka Kelly thought she was done working in Hollywood before landing a role on the hit Netflix show.

During a recent appearance on "Today with Jenna & Friends," the 44-year-old actress opened up about wondering if her time as an actress had come to an end before getting cast on Netflix's latest hit show, saying, "I thought that so many times."

"I think that every job that finishes, you're like … and then the amount of time passes, and you are like, ‘OK, this is it. I had a good run and that’s okay. Everything's okay. I have my backup. I can be a scrub tech again,'" she said.

In the new show, Kelly plays a musician and owner of the town's local dance hall who finds herself stuck in a love triangle and having to choose between two feuding ranchers, played by Eoin Macken and Josh Duhamel.

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Kelly first became a household name when she starred as Lyla Garrity on the hit show "Friday Night Lights" from 2006 to 2009. Since then, she has appeared in various projects, including "Just Go With It," "Jane the Virgin," "Euphoria" and others.

After more than 20 years in the business, Kelly says her experience playing Quinn O'Grady on "Ransom Canyon" has been her favorite job "for a lot of reasons."

"I think the main reason just being I am in the best place I have ever been, so I'm able to just really be in it in a different way than before," she explained. "A sense of comfort that comes with life experience and also maybe just being a woman in her 40s."

Although she has found success in Hollywood, she admits to thinking about returning to her career as a scrub tech in the operating room "all the time."

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"Because I think it's a thing that sort of gives me a little bit of confidence," she explained. "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. It's really good to feel like you're good at something."

The show was filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Kelly grew up. When speaking with Jenna Bush Hager and Andy Cohen on "The Today Show," Kelly admitted the thought of returning to her hometown was "scary," but that once she was there, "it really was not so scary after all."

In her 2023 memoir, "Tell Me Everything," Kelly opened up about her rough childhood growing up with a single mother who worked as an exotic dancer. She detailed stories of going to the strip club with her mother as a child and her experiences with physical abuse and performing in peep shows at an adult video store to make ends meet.

"It was a kind of surreal and beautiful way to sort of put a bow on that whole story just to make peace with it, and then the universe is like, 'Let’s see how much peace you made with it,'" she said of returning to Albuquerque to film the show. "You just are like, ‘Wow, I have my power back.’" 

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She continued, "I have a deep compassion for that version of me, and now I get to experience New Mexico with more grown-up, more healed eyes and see all the beauty that there is that you sort of don't get to appreciate when you're younger."