Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford, who shared the massive screen in “The Mosquito Coast,” are reunited, 36 years later, on the small screen in “1923” — the “Yellowstone” prequel series that continues Taylor Sheridan’s epic, cross-century saga of the Dutton ranching family.
Sunday night’s series premiere snared 7.4 million viewers across Paramount+ and linear telecasts — the streamer’s most-watched premiere ever within the US.
“We signed on without reading the script, with a way of religion and belief [in Sheridan] and that he was going to make something extraordinary,” Mirren, 77, told The Post. “I see this as an American ‘War and Peace’ — a take a look at this huge arc of American history through the intimate eyes of the people immediately involved within the creation of that history.
“I don’t see this as a ‘franchise,’” Mirren said of Sheridan’s Dutton universe, which also includes last 12 months’s “1883” with stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill as James and Margaret Dutton. “I see it as a rare essay on American history and done in a way that it couldn’t have been done years ago. We’re history now in a way more critical fashion.”
Because it title implies, “1923,” streaming on Paramount+, unfolds after the tip of World War I and the early years of Prohibition. Mirren plays Irish-born Cara Dutton with Ford as Jacob Dutton, the brother of her late husband, James, who later married Cara and took over the family ranch in Montana.
Co-stars include James Badge Dale as John Dutton Sr.; Darren Mann as John Sr.’s son, Jack; Michelle Randolph as Elizabeth Stafford, Jack’s fiancee; Brandon Sklenar as Spencer Dutton, a battle-scarred WWI vet estranged from the family and hunting game in Africa; Brian Geraghty (creepy Ronald from “Big Sky”) as Zane, the Duttons’ loyal ranch foreman; and Sebastian Roche as Father Renaud, the headmaster of a college for American Indians (which aspects heavily into the “1923” plotline).
“Cara is a survivor. She’s a fighter. She needs to be,” Mirren said of her onscreen alter-ego. “She’s very much the product of being an immigrant on this country of immigrants, having to place her eggs in that basket. That’s the character of immigrants — that they had no return ticket, that they had to make a go of it here, they simply needed to, and that’s still the case.
“Her marriage to Jacob is a real partnership.”
The eight-episode series was filmed on location in Montana, which played an enormous part in helping to ascertain its contextual tone, Mirren said.
“The American landscape never fails to blow me away; anywhere I’m going in America it’s so beautiful and big and overpowering,” she said. “On the last day of shooting, it was freezing cold, minus 25 degrees and snow … and I used to be up on the highest of Bear Mountain in Montana and I stood there and thought, ‘I can’t wait to be back here.’ You can’t overestimate the strength of [that landscape] and visually it’s amazing for the audience to see that as well.”
Mirren, who’s won an Oscar (“The Queen“) and five Emmys (including two for “Prime Suspect,” for which she took him three BAFTA awards), said she and Ford — who’s making his series debut — would occasionally bump into one another at industry functions within the years following “The Mosquito Coast.” “I used to be amazed he remembered me in any respect,” she said. “After I worked with him before our status was so different. He was a humongous movie star and I used to be a successful theater actress, principally, who’d done a pair of films but nothing on his scale.
“He was at all times kind and generous then and much more so now,” she said. “What’s amazing about Harrison is [that] he’s been this huge film star for a very very long time and yet he’s a employee. He just desires to work and doesn’t have the desire to make a fuss about it or want any particularly special treatment. He’s at all times there and the crew never wait for him. And I really like that about him.”
Mirren, who’s no stranger to television, said that “1923” offered a latest tackle the genre, each visually and thematically.
“Our whole idea of watching television has completely modified within the last 10 years … and Taylor has at all times presented it as [that[ we’re basically doing a 10-hour film [with ‘1923’] and I occur to actually like long movies,” she said. “I really like the best way characters might be fully developed and on TV, with this longform way, you do have the chance to develop character and plot in a way more wonderful and sophisticated way than in case you only had two hours to inform a story.
“It’s great to take a seat at home and watch something on the size and great thing about this work we’re putting onscreen, but I do love the cinema with an audience as well,” she said. “I feel we have now to maintain that culture — there’s nothing quite like sitting in an audience of individuals all sniffling together or laughing together at the identical joke.”