Harrison Ford Is Open to Continuing in ‘Yellowstone’ Universe After ‘1923’

The star joined Helen Mirren, Julia Schlaepfer and Aminah Nieves at a FYC event for their prequel series, which released its possible series finale April 6. The next prequel series in the ‘Yellowstone’-verse is ‘1944.’

Harrison Ford speaks during Paramount+’s ‘1923’ FYC event at Linwood Dunn Theater on May 4 in Los Angeles. Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Paramount+

[This story contains major spoilers from the 1923 season two finale.]

Harrison Ford spent his May the 4th celebrating not Star Wars but Yellowstone prequel series 1923, which recently released it second and possible final season.

At a FYC event for the series in Los Angeles on Sunday, Ford — who plays patriarch Jacob Dutton, opposite Helen Mirren‘s Cara — told The Hollywood Reporter he thought the way the show ended with the season two finale “was fantastic — I thought it was very tight storytelling and I was absolutely delighted with it. It’s probably the densest script and work that I’ve had a chance to work on in a long, long time.”

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Mirren joked she was “convinced that I was going to die so I was quite surprised I was still alive at the end of the show”; indeed the second season ended with both Mirren and Ford’s characters surviving, while Alex (played by Julia Schlaepfer) finally makes it to Montana and gives birth to her and Spencer Dutton’s (Brandon Sklenar) baby John just before she herself dies. That baby seems to be the direct family link to John Dutton III, played by Kevin Costner in Yellowstone, though the cast has stopped short from confirming that without creator Taylor Sheridan‘s blessing.

“I love the fact that the future of Yellowstone is left in this tiny baby, in the arms of two older people, grandparents age. I thought that was a very interesting concept,” Mirren continued, referring to her final scene cradling baby John. “And [creator] Taylor [Sheridan] now I think is going to do 1944 as I understand, so that will be interesting too, the next generation.”

1944 is the next chronological prequel in the Yellowstone-verse, though Paramount hasn’t officially said if 1923 is indeed ending with the season two finale. The time jump means a 20-year-old John Dutton II could be the focus of 1944, and Sklenar has expressed interest in returning to play Spencer, now a father and running the family ranch, in that prequel show. Ford and Mirren’s characters, who would be nearing 100 years old in 1944, say they would be open to returning in flashbacks or some other capacity in the Yellowstone universe. “I’m still alive,” Ford joked of Jacob Dutton, and said he would be interested in coming back if Sheridan “asks nice.” But, he added, “I have no idea what his plans are.”

Schlaepfer also hopes to come back to play Alex in some way, having previously pitched to THR returning in ghost form. “I know Brandon was lobbying for me to be a ghost,” she adds now. “I’d be an Alex ghost, for sure.”

At the event, Mirren, Ford, Schlaepfer and Aminah Nieves took part in a Q&A surrounding the season; Sklenar was scheduled to attend but canceled due to sickness.

Ford noted how in the first episode of the series his character hung four men, so “I thought it was an opportunity to really invest in a very complicated characterization, because this is not a hero. This is a complicated man who does some bad shit and then goes on with his life. And I think that’s a very interesting kind of character to play, and not one that frequently comes my way.”

As the group also discussed the importance of real-life sets and the high budgets that allowed them to build the show’s world, as Ford continued, “It’s not a simple cowboys and Indians movie. It’s a really complicated story about a really complicated history, and there’s a lot of incredibly searing detail in it” that “really fly in the face of Western mythology as it is, but we can see what comes out of it and why it persists. This mythology persists in American culture and it’s a time that’s, I think, especially a critical time in American culture — the coming of the Great Depression, the great changes of modernization brought. So happily, we had a writer that wrote that complication into it.”