Juliette Lewis Talks Working With Peter Dinklage in ‘The Thicket’ and Explains Her Surprise Exit From ‘Yellowjackets’: ‘I’m Good for a Series for Two Seasons’

Juliette Lewis has a very good reason why her horseback riding skills are so impressive in her new thriller, “The Thicket.”

“I’m a third-place ribbon barrel racer,” Lewis says on this week’s episode of “Just for Variety.” “I was an equestrian. I grew up riding horses before I was 12. So the first thing we did in Calgary (where the movie was shot in the dead of winter) was get on a horse. They wanted to check us out, how you surrounded. “I got a very good rating with my horse riding.”

In the Elliott Lester-directed movie (in theaters Sept. 6), based on Joe R. Lansdale’s book of the same name, Lewis plays Cut Throat Bill, a violent hardened outlaw at the turn of the 20th century who kidnaps a young girl ( Esmé Creed-Miles ). The girl’s brother (Levon Hawke) hires a bounty hunter (Peter Dinklage) to rescue his sister from him.

Cut Throat Bill, written in the original book as a man,…