Helen Mirren was just as surprised as anybody to see Cara survive that deadly siege of the Dutton ranch in the 1923 finale.

Both the actress, 79, and her onscreen husband Jacob Dutton (Harrison Ford) were alive and well — and had Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) and Alex’s (Julia Schlaepfer) newborn baby to raise — when the Yellowstone prequel series came to a dramatic end on April 6. But Mirren was not expecting that to be the case.

“Harrison and I signed up for [1923] without having any idea of what the story was going to be, where it was going to go. I fully expected to be killed off,” Mirren told Gold Derby. “I did. I fully expected [it]. I thought, ‘Okay, obviously I’ll die in the second [season].”

She said the cast “always knew” that the story would have just two installments — season 1 premiered in December 2022 — because creator Taylor Sheridan had said “it’s going to have a beginning, middle and an end, and that’s — and I love that. I thought that was great.”

“But I did expect to probably kick the bucket in the second-to-last episode or something,” she told the outlet. “But no! There I am at the very end — that was great. That was a surprise.”

“I’m sure it took a lot of people by surprise. It’s not what you expect — and that’s what Taylor’s very good at.”

Jacob and Cara surviving — while Alex and Jack (Darren Mann) both did not — might not have been what Mirren or Ford, 82, saw coming, but it’s the perfect ending for the characters, whose relationship is so “rare to see,” Mirren previously told PEOPLE.

“In movies, people get married or they meet-cute and they fall in love and they have hot sex or whatever, and then it’s all over, happily ever after,” she said. “Now we’re seeing what happens at the end of that story, and you very rarely see that onscreen, but it’s actually something that people love to see.”

She continued of Jacob and Cara, “They do love to see what does happen in the ever after, if this is a couple who absolutely should be together, are together, fit perfectly well together, and that does happen. That does happen in life.”

“These two are partners as much as lovers,” Ford told PEOPLE of his perspective on their onscreen duo.

“And [they’re] depending on each other for things that they are not part of their quiver of arrows. And it’s an extraordinary relationship that Taylor has written for us to inhabit.”