The two actors rely on the strength of the writing and the “beautiful machine” of television production to bring life to their characters
Making a TV show is a different beast from making a movie. While directors and showrunners often have the overall story arc planned, the final scripts usually aren’t finished when actors begin filming. For Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, that meant that they were often finding out what happened next in Yellowstone prequel 1923 when they were on set.
When shooting season one of 1923, both stars were relying on the whole team to make sure they delivered their lines. “We didn’t know,” Helen Mirren admitted. “That’s the other amazing thing: Like life, you don’t know what’s coming. We get our scripts probably three or four weeks [ahead]. I don’t know how they organize it; it’s incredible how the director prepares. But we don’t have much of an idea of where it’s going… There’s this amazingly beautiful machine at work. You’re not quite sure where it’s going, but you know you can rely on the machine, absolutely, and so you’re in very safe hands. I never had a feeling of treasury ever.”
Harrison Ford, who we know is prone to signing up to projects without reading the script, was in a similar boat. He partially blamed the frantic shooting schedule for not reading his lines ahead of time. “I think when you’re working at the rate that we are, we often get scenes maybe just a week before we shot it, but we’re so busy with what we’re doing that day that we don’t really have time to reflect on it.”
The trick to delivering lines with such emotions even without having time to consider their meaning? Great writing. “The writing is so strong that when you arrive in a scene with those words, you just have to say the words,” explains Ford. “The character has been developed for you by the writer, and the extension or the complication of that character is in that scene. You just have to say the words and be in the room. Be there and it happens to you. You don’t have to act it. It happens to you.”
There is something beautifully zen about Ford’s approach, which, while giving all due credit to the writers for the Yellowstone prequel, absolves him of any responsibility to read the scripts ahead of time. But when you’ve been acting as long as he and Helen Mirren have, things just come naturally.
