There’s something so inexplicably compelling about the Dutton family and their adventures that it really doesn’t really matter if you’re following John or his ancestor Jacob from a hundred years before. That’s probably the main reason 1923 managed to imitate the success of the original show, but according to Harrison Ford, playing Jacob was essentially like reliving his own life.
Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone universe is growing at a rapid pace thanks to several new spinoff projects, with 1923 taking you to the uncertain time of the Great Depression and following Harrison Ford’s Jacob Dutton and Helen Mirren’s Cara Dutton as they struggle against the ever-present threat of expansionism.
Interestingly enough, Harrison Ford actually owns a ranch himself, and according to his latest interview with The Hollywood Reporter, getting into Jacob’s mentality came as easily as breathing because of that. Taylor’s script was apparently “emotionally consistent” with the things that happened to Ford in his own life, so that put him in a unique position to bring the character to life in all of his little nuances.
“When Taylor and I first met face-to-face, there was no script because he didn’t want to write a script for people that are going to turn him down,” Ford said. “But there are things in the scripts that I never would’ve anticipated that are emotionally consistent with things that have happened in my life. So when I was reading it, I was thinking, ‘What the f*ck?'”
The Star Wars and Indiana Jones legend doesn’t elaborate much further than that, though he brings up all the wonted topics the Yellowstone franchise deals with regardless of the time period.
“They’re little things. I’m not going to tell you what they are. But he talks about turning a natural place into a city and the consequences to nature and for the people that live there. He talks about it with real understanding and real complexity. I’m struck by how consistent it is with what I think — or what I might have thought were I a rancher with the same personality in 1923.”
The first season of 1923 consists of eight episodes, the sixth of which will premiere this weekend on February 12. The spinoff has been renewed for a second and final season, which will also contain eight episodes.