While they play husband and wife on Paramount+’s Yellowstone spinoff prequel 1923, the popular series isn’t the first time Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren have shared the screen. The pair have played husband and wife before in the 1986 film The Mosquito Coast. For Mirren, getting to work with Ford again in 1923, despite it being more than three decades since that film, was like no time had passed at all. Speaking at the Deadline Contenders TV panel, Mirren had nothing but praise for Ford, calling him “such a beautiful person”.
“Harrison is just so… I mean I’ve worked with him before, many many years ago we played husband and wife in a film called Mosquito Coast and he was the massive star that he is now then as well and so you know Harrison is a very specific person in our history of film and of acting on screen,” Mirren said. “He inhabits a very specific space doesn’t he. and he’s just such a beautiful person I have to say It was so great to come back and it was as if the thirty years just hadn’t existed and here we were together again as husband and wife. I just can’t say too much about Harrison really, in the sense of my love for him because I think he’s just fantastic as a person.”
In 1923, Mirren and Ford play Cara and Jacob Dutton who own and run the Yellowstone ranch after the deaths of James Dutton and his wife Margaret, making them the matriarch and patriarch of the Dutton family during the Great Depression era. The first season aired its finale in February of this year and a second season is already on the way — something Ford has previously said he’s excited about. When speaking with The Hollywood Reporter
“The simplest answer is probably the most truthful: After two years of sitting on my ass during COVID, and waiting quite a few years for Indiana Jones to start, I had not done as much work as I wanted to and I wanted to do different things,” Ford said about his recent influx of work. “So [Shrinking] came along and then, very quickly after that, 1923 came along. I took the job without a script on both of them, on faith that the people who created the projects were going to deliver me a good script. I really didn’t realize how much work 1923 was going to be, and I absolutely feel it’s worth it. I’m excited to do another season of both.”
What Is 1923 About?
1923, the next installment of the Dutton family origin story, will introduce a new generation of Duttons led by patriarch Jacob (Harrison Ford) and matriarch Cara (Helen Mirren). The series will explore the early twentieth century when pandemics, historic drought, the end of Prohibition and the Great Depression all plague the mountain west, and the Duttons who call it home.
In addition to Ford and Mirren, 1923 also stars Darren Mann (Animal Kingdom), Michelle Randolph (A Snow White Christmas), James Badge Dale (Hightown), Marley Shelton (Scream), Brian Geraghty (Big Sky), Aminah Nieves (Blueberry), and Jerome Flynn (Game of Thrones).
The first season of 1923 is now streaming on Paramount+. Season 2 does not yet have a release date.
