Harrison Ford as Jacob Dutton in 1923
Courtesy of James Minchin III/Paramount+
Putting a hat on Harrison Ford is no simple task.
The actor, who made Indiana Jones’ fedora iconic, needed a new topper for his role opposite Helen Mirren in 1923, Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone spinoff centered on the Dutton family. “It’s all about the hat on a Western,” costume designer Janie Bryant told The Hollywood Reporter at the recent premiere. “I worked with my hat maker for weeks to make a lot of different hats in different colors and silhouettes.”
Just how many hats did they make? “I’m guessing about 75,” admits Bryant, the Mad Men costume designer who won an Emmy for her work on Deadwood. “We made so many hats but we had to get the crease just right. And we finally found it and I said, ‘That’s [Jacob Dutton’s] hat with the Montana crease.’”
The show marks the next installment of the Dutton family origin story and it casts Ford as Jacob Dutton and Mirren as Cara Dutton in a series that explores the early 20th century when pandemics, historic drought, the end of Prohibition and the Great Depression all plague the mountain West. Marley Shelton, Michelle Randolph, James Badge Dale, Brian Geraghty, Darren Mann, Aminah Nieves, Jerome Flynn, Sebastian Roché, Tim DeKay, Julia Schlaepfer, Jennifer Ehle and Timothy Dalton round out the cast of the MTV Entertainment Studios, 101 Studios and Bosque Ranch production.
Bryant knows the Western world well after having worked with Sheridan on the other Yellowstone spinoff, 1883. For this new one, she found both Mirren and Ford to be true collaborators.
“They’re such pros and it’s amazing to work with them because they ask a lot of questions about their characters,” she explains. “They also bring specific elements to their characters as well. For example, with Helen, we talked a lot about her character being a little bit more old fashioned because she’s older so her silhouettes are set in the nineteen-teens era as opposed to the 1920s. We saw eye-to-eye creatively on that, which was really fun.”
Paramount+ debuts 1923 on Dec. 19.
Emmy winning costume designer Janie Bryant at the 1923 premiere.
JC Olivera/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images
This story first appeared in the Dec. 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.