Helen Mirren has shared the one thing that’s always bothered her about American Western films.
The British actor currently stars opposite Harrison Ford in Paramount+’s Yellowstone spin-off 1923, which is set in Montana in the years before the Great Depression.
Mirren and Ford play a married couple who run a cattle ranch, with Mirren speaking in an Irish accent on the show.
In a new interview with The Times, Mirren explained that her choice of dialect came after often feeling frustrated at the accents seen in traditional Western films and shows.
“It always annoyed me about American westerns that everybody spoke with American accents,” she explained.
“They were all immigrants. In Butte, Montana, they were from Cornwall – they have Cornish pasties there – from Wales, Scotland, from Ireland, from Moldova, from the Basque region in Spain. So this incredible mix of accents and cultures and food. And that is very much what created America.”
Harrison and Mirren first worked together 36 years ago on the 1986 film adaptation of Paul Theroux’s book The Mosquito Coast.
“The relationship was obviously very, very different then because Harrison was already an enormous movie star and I was a theatre actress out of London and nobody had heard of me,” Mirren explained.
“Now our relationship is very different because I’ve sort of caught up with him. Well, I’ll never catch up with him completely but I’m a little bit closer than I was.”
Created by Taylor Sheridan, 1923 follows a new generation of the Dutton family (who have featured in previous Yellowstone shows) as they struggle to survive historic drought, lawlessness and prohibition, as well as an epidemic of cattle theft.
Previous Yellowstone spin-off 1883 aired for one season in 2021, and starred Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.
1923 is on Paramount+ now.
