Dame Helen Mirren has a point to make when we sit down to talk about the second and final series of Taylor Sheridan’s 1923. “It’s great at this point in my career, and this point in my life – which is, you know, towards the latter end of it, without a doubt – to find and to be offered great roles like Cara Dutton,” she says. As difficult as that statement is to stomach – the 79-year-old is a beloved mainstay in film, television and theatre, with a career spanning six decades – it is testament to the enthralling story in Sheridan’s Western drama that the Yellowstone prequel excited an actress with a career as rich and decorated as Mirren’s. “I see it as a lesson in being American, really, as much as anything,” she adds of 1923, the first series of which thrilled audiences and critics alike. “Which is why I very much wanted Cara to be an immigrant.

“When I was first cast in it, I said to Taylor Sheridan: ‘I want to make her Irish’. I wanted to have an Irish accent in there to say: these people are immigrants, as so many of them were in Montana, in the ranching business and in the mining business.” As Mirren explains, 1923 is set in the western state of Montana – a relatively sparsely populated state characterised by its numerous mountain ranges and, on its eastern side, prairie terrain and badlands. Montana has had a tumultuous history, with the discovery of gold bringing large numbers of settlers in the mid-19th century, and its natural resources such as oil, gas and coal once earned it the unofficial nickname of ‘The Treasure State’.

As its title suggests, 1923 is set in the early 20th century and follows a generation of the Dutton family – whose successors, in modern-set Yellowstone, own the largest ranch in Montana – as they deal with the hardships of American life in this time period. Prohibition, drought, and the early stages of the Great Depression are striking the area, and the Wall Street crash of 1929 is just around the corner. “When you look at the 20th century, from 1900 to the year 2000, it’s absolutely extraordinary,” says Mirren. “You go from basically no electric light to computers. It’s an amazing trajectory… “And the Twenties…the Industrial Revolution was finally really producing, the trains arrived, the car arrived, shortly after that, air flight arrived, and there you are in the melting pot of all of that. “Fortunes are being made, massive fortunes were made almost overnight in the mining business… The history of mining in America is an extraordinary history.”

For London-born Mirren, filming in the mining town of Butte, Montana, was an eye-opening insight into the industrial history of the American West. “There are so many of these little ghost towns all over the West, real ghost towns, that exploded with mining, but only really lasted about 50 years because the mine finished and everybody moved on,” she explains. The final series of 1923 explores how difficult it was for settlers to cling onto their property and their fortunes: In 1883, another Yellowstone prequel which premiered in 2021, audiences saw how the Dutton family journeyed from Tennessee across Texas to Montana to establish what would eventually become the Yellowstone Ranch, and now we witness how easily the family could lose everything. We find Jacob and Cara Dutton, played by Indiana Jones and Star Wars star Harrison Ford and Mirren, respectively, at Dutton ranch during a cruel winter, where a combination of harsh conditions and threatening adversaries could spell the end of the family legacy. Spencer Dutton is on an arduous journey home, racing against time to save his family and their home, while Alexandra sets off on her own harrowing trans-Atlantic journey to find him and reclaim their love.

It is the “brutality and magnificence” of the United States’ geography and social history that has really drawn Mirren, with her Academy Award, four BAFTAs, five Emmys, three Golden Globes, Olivier and Tony Award, into the world of Cara Dutton, and she fondly recalls her own American railroad trip across the breadth of the vast country, and what it taught her about the country’s history. “Many years ago, I took a train when I was doing theatre in America – we were working in San Francisco, and our next job was in Detroit – and I decided, rather than flying to Detroit, which is how the rest of the theatre group were going, I would take a train,” she explains. “I took a train from San Francisco to Detroit, across America. And it was so…it informed me, it taught me so much about America, taking that trip, and I feel playing Cara Dutton and being in those extraordinary mountains of Montana has done the same thing. It’s very easy, as a European, really to misunderstand America and Americans,” adds Mirren, who won her Academy Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in 2006’s The Queen. “Of course, America is an incredibly complex place. “You think of it going from the Blue Mountains to New Orleans to Seattle and all the different geographic experiences that America offers. One of those geographic experiences is the brutality and the magnificence of things like the Sierra Nevada, or the mountains of Montana.”

Season two of 1923 comes to Paramount+ tomorrow