Dame Helen Mirren on death, guns and Yellowstone: 1923’s fraught second season

Taylor Sheridan’s sprawling ‘Yellowstone’ prequel returns with a darker, more brutal second season. Tom Murray speaks to Helen Mirren, who plays the Dutton family’s fierce matriarch, and her co-star about the trials that lie ahead for Montana’s most sought-after ranch.

For all her plummy, Oscar-winning regality in The Queen, Helen Mirren has wielded her fair share of shooters over the years. There was her chain-smoking DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, her retired assassin in Red and – ahem – four Fast & Furious movies. Perhaps that’s why she looks right at home with a shotgun broken over her elbow in 1923, the expansive Yellowstone prequel series set amid the backdrop of Prohibition-era Montana. In fact, season one opened with her character Cara Dutton gunning down an assailant before letting out a guttural scream.

“[It was] a very dramatic moment, and subsequently you find out why she commits this rather appalling act,” the septuagenarian actor remembers of that particular storyline. “In season two, the use of the gun is much more related to dealing with the wildness of the environment and the potential danger of wild animals coming to attack and possibly eat you,” she teases.

Guns and violence are at the heart of 1923, which stars Mirren as the steely, Irish-accented matriarch of the Dutton family. Her ranching dynasty will one day spawn Kevin Costner’s John Dutton III. A typically gruff Harrison Ford plays her husband, Jacob Dutton, lines like canyons now etched in his wizened face. In a dilemma that will perennially face the ranch owners’ descendants, people are after their land. This season, it’s short-lived Bond Timothy Dalton and Game of Thrones’s Jerome Flynn. They play the reprehensible tag team of Donald Whitfield and Banner Creighton – the former a sexually sadistic mining tycoon, the latter a vengeful Scottish sheep farmer out for Jacob’s blood. In season two, Donald sponsors Banner to build an army to take down the Duttons once and for all.

Appearing over Zoom from Los Angeles, wearing a deep-cut red blouse and a gleaming silver pendant, Mirren admits to having mixed feelings about firearms on screen. “It’s always difficult, isn’t it, between dealing with the truth of history and at the same time, not wanting to proselytise about the use of guns.”.

She recalls her role in Red. “I rather foolishly said to the director, ‘Alright, I know I’m a sniper, but I don’t think I should kill anyone.’ I said, ‘She’s very accurate. So she only ever kills to stop people in their tracks. She’ll just get them in the legs so they can’t continue. But it’s got to be very clear that I don’t kill anyone.’” She laughs. “It didn’t work out that way, of course. But you know, I did try.”.

There would likely have been little point attempting to sway the mind of series creator Taylor Sheridan anyway. The prolific writer-director is known for taking a “my way or the highway” approach with his actors – a clash of egos was reportedly behind Costner’s acrimonious exit from Yellowstone last year.

Happily, Mirren’s 29-year-old co-star Julia Schlaepfer tells me Sheridan had a much more hands-off approach when it came to the prequel. If Ford and Mirren are the show’s leads in Montana, Schlaepfer and the It Ends with Us star Brandon Sklenar are its leads abroad – the pair’s characters, haughty English aristocrat Alexandra and haunted Dutton heir Spencer, meet while on safari in Kenya. She promptly ditches her snooty wisp of a fiancé for the American hunk.

Sheridan flew the show’s young duo out to his sprawling, $600m ranch in Texas to rehearse with him before shooting began. “By the end of that weekend, he said, ‘Just bring as much of your own spirit to the characters as you can. I cast you for a reason.’ Which was kind of an honour and very empowering as an actor,” Schlaepfer tells me.

In season one, Spencer is busy drowning his PTSD from the First World War in whiskey and the blood of man-eating leopards when the captivating “Alex” convinces him to trade it in for the quiet life. In Sheridan’s distinctively theatrical style, they’re married within a day but their honeymoon is cut short as Spencer receives a letter from Cara warning that his family is in grave peril.

Season two sees the couple making their way to Montana separately after a debacle on a cruise ship involving Alex’s ex (let’s just say it didn’t end well for him). “It was very exciting for me to know that I would begin on my own and you would see Alex using her own strength and fighting her own battles, as opposed to relying on Spencer,” Schlaepfer says.

It quickly becomes apparent that Sheridan is out to shock audiences this time around – in the first episode of the new series, a man is violently raped and a small child is unceremoniously trampled by a horse. Ominously, the premiere ends with the revelation that Alex’s ticket to America has been downgraded to third class, or as her friend calls it, “thieves and beggars class”. “It is a bit ominous,” Schlaepfer agrees, laughing. Alluding to the troubles that lie ahead, the actor admits she received a foreboding call from Sheridan about her character’s journey. He told her: “This is the arc. It’s going to be really challenging, and it’s going to test you as an actor. It’s going to bring out a different side of you than season one. Are you game?”.