Helen Mirren is an icon of the screen – but she really needs to stop doing terrible Irish accents. Already this year, unsuspecting Paramount+ subscribers have had to bear witness to her dreadful attempt at sounding like a Kerry woman in Guy Ritchie’s MobLand. Now, RTÉ is inflicting another horror upon us in the form of the violent melodrama 1923 (RTÉ One, 9.35pm) – a prequel to the blockbusting Kevin Costner modern cowboy caper Yellowstone, in which Mirren plays the wife of Harrison Ford’s rugged rancher Jacob Dutton in Prohibition-era Montana.
It’s another meaty part for Mirren, first seen gunning down a homesteader who has dared to cross paths with the indomitable Dutton. But dear goodness, that accent: she sounds like one of the feral Irish hobbits from Amazon’s Rings of Power washing their mouth out with Lucky Charms. Incredibly, the idea for Mirren to speak like this originated with the actor herself. She suggested to showrunner Tyler Sheridan that her character, Cara, should hail from the old country.
“I thought of making her Irish because America very much in those days was a country of immigrants,” she told Deadline. “I wanted to heighten that fact.”
Heighten is one word for it – and hers isn’t even the worst Irish accent. That honour goes to American actor Jennifer Ehle, playing a violent nun named Sister Mary, and who apparently hails from Donegal one moment, Dublin the next. She is introduced teaching a class of Native American girls and viciously beating a student for speaking in her native language.
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An Irish person beating someone for speaking a language other than English is richly ironic. But you can’t help but wonder whether that paradox is lost on Sheridan, who seems to regard the Scots and Irish as nothing beyond violent and unruly (15 minutes in and they’re already engaged in a mass punch-up).
Sheridan’s shows tends to be more about mood than plot. So it proves in 1923, which splits the story between Cara and Jacob’s experiences as frontier ranchers in Montana and their nephew Spencer (Brandon Sklenar), a veteran of the second World War who has embarked on a life shooting iffy CGI lions and elephants in Kenya.
Once one of the biggest names in film, Ford, has started to work more on television across the past decade. He is resplendently craggy as Jacob, whom you might initially mistake for the town sheriff – he wears a pointy badge – but is, in fact, the local livestock commissioner (whatever that is).
He is a gruff, hard-charging character who isn’t much bothered whether he makes enemies – which he does when he crosses an angry farmer (Jerome Flynn, very much on brand with his dire Scottish accent).
Sheridan has become one of the biggest forces in television by giving audiences (American ones especially) what they want. That is, hard-bitten tales of inexpressive men bending the world to their will. Such was the formula of Yellowstone. Or at least it was until Sheridan fell out with Costner and killed off his character off screen. And it is the algorithm that drives 1923 – a well-put-together drama that runs aground on Mirren’s baffling attempt to sound like a Victorian musical-hall caricature of an Irish person.
1923 can be viewed on RTÉ Player and Paramount+
