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Sun 30 November 2025 9:30, UK
What a life Helen Mirren has led, and so many memorable parts in an acting career that’s spanned an astonishing sixty years and has seen her play detectives, assassins, three different British Queens and even a villainous immortal Goddess. This year she’s already been in all kinds of stuff, including the final episodes of Taylor Sheridan’s 1923.
That TV show ran for two seasons, serving as both a sequel and a prequel in Sheridan’s Yellowstone franchise, the star-packed global smash that has seen cowboys and the Midwest become the destination of choice for many leading actors over the last five years or so.
But it’s something of a surprise that Mirren was involved at all, given she apparently isn’t a fan of Westerns, especially given that when she signed on to play the role of Cara Dutton, the head of the family in the show, she hadn’t even seen a script. As to why she did a 180, she told Rolling Stone:
“I loved Taylor Sheridan’s films. I loved Wind River. I knew that it wouldn’t be the normal kind of Western, the kind that I don’t usually like. Which, I have to say, is an extremely old fashioned idea of a Western — the sort of 1950s version where the women were either teachers or madams at a brothel, and there was nothing in between. I knew 1923 wouldn’t be like that.”
Mirren also admitted that her dislike of the genre doesn’t extend to one particularly bloody example from 2015 starring Kurt Russell and Walton Goggins, though, adding:
“I did love the Western that Quentin Tarantino did (The Hateful Eight). I thought it was fantastic. That’s my kind of Western, with characters that are incredibly flawed and interesting and violent. You know, the survivalist nature of The Hateful Eight, it’s just incredible.”
Tarantino’s mystery thriller was originally written as a follow-up to 2012’s Django Unchained, but in the end, the director decided to have it stand alone from that movie. It tells the story of eight strangers holed up in a cabin seeking refuge from a Wyoming blizzard, each of them with secrets and none of them trusting each other.
Featuring Ennio Morricone’s final movie score, which finally brought him an Oscar for Best Score at the sixth time of asking, the film has a nigh-on three-hour running time and is packed with violence, some of which proved controversial even for Tarantino as he took flak for the treatment of the sole female lead character.
It was Tarantino’s eighth movie and proved to be a moderate success at the box office, while critics were a little more mixed than usual. It was nominated for three Oscars and three Golden Globes, and Tarantino re-released it as an extended four-part series for Netflix in 2019.
Mirren, meanwhile, has had another busy year with Guy Ritchie’s Mob Land and the first movie adaptation of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club. She also completed work on another film with an ensemble cast, this time Goodbye June, which will arrive on Netflix on Christmas Eve this year.
The story of a broken family coming together to say their farewells to Mirren’s dying character, the movie features the likes of Toni Collette, Kate Winslet, Stephen Merchant and Timothy Spall. Mirren has also completed filming on Switzerland, a new film from Control director Anton Corbijn.
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