Jennifer Carpenter made her brief introduction this week on 1923.
The second season of Taylor Sheridan‘s Yellowstone prequel series picked up where it left off with Teonna Rainwater (Aminah Nieves), the Native girl who escaped the assimilation school where she was being abused in Montana — killing several nuns along the way — and who is now wanted by the head priest (Sebastian Roché) and a marshal (Jamie McShane) traveling with him on horseback to find her.
When Father Renaud (Roché) and Marshal Kent (McShane) trace Teonna to Anadarko, Oklahoma, they meet with the marshal in charge and are taken aback to see that it’s a woman. It’s there they are greeted by Mamie Fossett, played by 1923 new cast member Jennifer Carpenter in the early 20th century-set series.
When Kent questions her ability to serve the badge because she’s a woman, she promptly shuts him down. “You patrol this territory, serving warrants, making arrests, why do I find that hard to believe?” he asks. “Because you’re a bigot,” she replies, “living in the wrong century.” She warns him to tread lightly, “This is not Montana.”
Carpenter is playing the trailblazing Mamie Fossett, who is based on the real-life deputy marshal of the same name. Not much has been written about Fossett, who was one of the few women who worked as a deputy in the territory at that time.
“I was able to find about 10 sentences about the actual Mamie Fossett,” Carpenter tells The Hollywood Reporter of her prep work for 1923 season two. “She probably came to this territory looking to homestead, it didn’t work out for one reason or another, and so she signed up to be a U.S. marshal — not to work behind a desk, but to go into the territory and try to pull the criminals out, which was the deadliest work that one could do it that time. Having that as the framework of who she was was a nice place to start.”
Carpenter also researched the innovations that are being highlighted on the series from the late 1800s to the early 1920s, like toasters and vacuum cleaners, “at least where all the flappers lived, I’m not sure that Mamie had those things,” she says. And she read Empire of the Summer Moon [by S.C. Gwynne] and says she accidentally read all of Lonesome Dove [by Larry McMurtry]. “I meant to only just get a taste, but my god, what a fantastic read,” she said.
“Before you arrive, you imagine what the dirt and the costumes and the smells and the feel of the bramble under your feet are going to be like. And then when you show up, you realize that work is done for you,” she says of the writing on the page from creator Sheridan. “It was the most relaxed and the richest work, and the purest soil that I’ve ever gotten to till. This was what I dreamed acting could be like when I said at 8 that I wanted to do it.”
Carpenter, who memorably starred on Dexter, and revival series Dexter: New Blood, as police detective Deb Morgan, sister to Michael C. Hall’s serial killer, says she chased down the chance to play Fossett. “I roped it. I wanted it like I haven’t wanted anything in a very long time,” she says, “but as soon as I got the call that that I was going to have the privilege, that’s when the fear set in. Luckily there was a long time before we actually started shooting. So I did all of the prep mostly out of fear, and then learned that the cast and the crew of 1923 are a very loving, welcoming community and it was very easy to put your best foot forward because everybody was there if you slipped.”
The rest of the main 1923 cast are returning stars, as the second season serves as a continuation to the saga that Sheridan began with in season one. 1923 follows the next set of Dutton elders (the ancestors to the Dutton family on Yellowstone) after the first prequel series, 1883. Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren play Jacob and Cara Dutton, the Duttons who get the Yellowstone ranch up and running after the untimely deaths of James (Tim McGraw) and Margaret Dutton (Faith Hill) from 1883. Their nephew Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) and his new wife Alex Dutton (Julia Schlaepfer) have been separated since the season one finale, while Spencer’s nephew Jack (Darren Mann) and Liz Dutton (Michelle Randolph) remain in Montana helping Jacob and Cara run the ranch in the brutal Montana winter.
Teonna’s storyline exists separate from the main Dutton family, at least at the moment, and Carpenter teased how their characters will meet. “She is in the territory that I’m protecting. So we just might intersect, in an honest way,” said Carpenter of Fossett and Teonna. The season trailer, meanwhile, also showed Fossett coming upon Spencer at some point during his journey back home.
She also teased an epic ending to season two, which Sheridan has been plotting since he pitched the series. Paramount+, meanwhile, has not confirmed if season two will be the end of the series.
“I read it [the finale], as we all did, and then I was able to see a rough cut of it. Even knowing exactly what was going to happen, I experienced it. I didn’t watch it. I felt like tears and other feelings were leapfrogging out of me and I couldn’t stuff them back in,” she says of where the season is heading. “The episode happened to me, which makes me just think about how wealthy the audiences will be when they watch it. It is the most generous, modern filmmaking that I have seen in a very long time. It’s a privilege to be a part of this operation.”