Just weeks before 1923 returns for a second season on Paramount Plus, Helen Mirren is opening up about her co-star Harrison Ford.

The 82-year-old actor was profiled in a wide-ranging piece for Wall Street Journal last week, where his co-star Mirren, 79, opened up her co-star.

She first met him on the set of the 1986 film The Mosquito Coast where they played an on-screen husband and wife.

Mirren – then more known as a classically-trained Shakespearean actor and a newcomer to Hollywood films – admitted she was a ‘nobody’ when they first met.

She added, ‘He was a huge star and he really didn’t want to be. He wanted to just be a quiet person getting on with life, and of course, that’s kind of impossible.’

Nearly four decades later, they reunited as another on-screen couple – Jacob and Clara Dutton – in 1923, where Mirren noticed a change in the actor… that she charts back to his near-death experience in his 2015 plane crash.

Ford – a licensed pilot since 1996 though he started t aking flying lessons in the 1960s – was forced to make an emergency landing at Penmar Golf Course in Venice, California in March 2015.

He was forced to make the landing after the plane’s engine lost power, and he was treated at a local hospital for a broken pelvis and a broken ankle, though he was still in fair condition for such a harrowing accident.

Mirren noted that when she worked with him again on 1923, she noticed some subtle differences in his work.

‘Something rather magical has happened to Harrison, especially with his history of, you know, being the dude, the bloke, the fabulous action guy, the funny guy, the cool guy,’ she said.

Mirren added, ‘Now there’s this open road to his inner feelings, which he is absolutely unafraid of expressing. It’s just a true, quick, instinctive emotional reaction to things, without sentimentality.’

She believed that surviving the 2015 crash had something to do with the changes in his acting, revealing some jarring insight from the first scene they filmed.

The scene in question took place in the aftermath of an ambush on the Dutton family ranch that left Ford’s Jacob Dutton bloodied and bullet-riddled.

‘He’s been carried into the kitchen, dying and covered in blood, and later Harrison did say to me, “That was how I was after the accident,”‘ she recalled.

Mirren added, ‘I think, maybe, going through that experience just gave him a very different understanding of what it is to be a sentient human being.’

1923 follows an earlier generation of the Dutton family as they fight to control their sprawling Montana ranch.

The show is set decades after the first Yellowstone prequel 1883, which showcased how the Dutton ranch was first established.

The second season of 1923 is slated to debut Sunday, February 23 on Paramount Plus.