The Yellowstone prequel series 1923 follows the Dutton family after they've established their ranch in Montana. The new decade has a slew of new battles for the Duttons to face, including an unprecedented drought and a turf war with neighboring ranchers. Tensions have finally boiled over, leaving the Yellowstone ranch in want of a leader. Young Spencer Dutton (Brandon Sklenar), however, is off in Africa, running from memories of the war by diving head first into the dangers of big game hunting.
Ahead of Episode 5, Sklenar spoke with CBR about bringing the character of Spencer to life. He dove into how he joined 1923 and what it was like to find the headspace of someone trying to recover from his time at war, but he also spoke about working with co-star Julia Schlaepfer to find their on-screen chemistry. Sklenar also dished on working with animal co-stars, including Bubbles the Elephant, and recovering from the infamous Yellowstone Cowboy camp.
CBR: How did you get involved with 1923? What did you seek out about this Yellowstone prequel project?
Brandon Sklenar: Taylor Sheridan has been at the top of my [list] in terms of creators in general for a number of years. I just think he's touching on something that I really respond to in terms of storytelling and Americana and the West. I grew up on Westerns and Clint Eastwood, and I just love it. Eugene O'Neill, Sam Shepard -- there are a lot of parallels and things that it reminds me of just in my own taste. Yeah, it's something that I very, very much wanted to be involved in.
I knew that the show was being made. I sort of annoyingly hounded my team about it for weeks and weeks and weeks and was like, "What's going on with 1923?" [They responded,] "Yeah, we'll see. We'll see." Then I was backpacking and camping for about a month. I was in the middle of nowhere, Oregon and Washington, and then I got the tape randomly as I was doing all that. I was like, "Alright, well, I need to get this together and find a place to tape." The day I happened to be in a house out of a month on the road was the day it was due. I was able to set up my stuff and get it out.
As soon as I read it... There are just certain things you respond to [and] certain things you don't. I've read plenty, and most of the things I read, I go, "This ain't my guy. There's somebody out there who's gonna do this better than I can." I read something about Spencer, and his vibe and the way he spoke just resonated with me. I felt very connected to it immediately. I sent the tape off, and I was like, "I got a good feeling about this one, I think."
I just obsessively thought about it for a couple of weeks. Then lo and behold, I got the call to go to Jackson Hole and read for Ben Richardson, our director, and for Taylor. It went great. [He] dug what he saw and felt it, [so] here we are. So I'd say it's "right place, right time," a little bit of manifestation, and a little bit of just being the right guy for the role, and I love it. I'm a big fan of Yellowstone and 1883, and it's good. I feel grateful to love what I do, really, with this project. I really do love it.
There's probably something about a month of backpacking that really puts you in the right mood for filming for Spencer.
That's what I'm saying. There's this weird mystical element to the whole thing where I was at a point with doing so many self-tapes and kind of beating my head against the wall and not getting in for things I really wanted to. I was like, "You know what, I'm just gonna go camping for a month and not pick up the phone and just get into nature." I was feeling pretty disenfranchised at the moment and kind of over it, and then that's when it comes knocking on the door, of course, because you let go, and you go, "You know what, I'm just gonna do my thing." Yeah, I think spiritually and mentally, I was in a good place and had a tan going. I had a mustache. [laughs]
When audiences meet Spencer, he's sort of going through some stuff in Africa. He's processing his involvement in the war in some maybe less-than-safe ways. How did you tap into that headspace for this early-season Spencer?
In terms of the war stuff, PTSD?
Yeah, in terms of dealing with the trauma he's gone through.
You know, what helped is the first thing that we shot was the war stuff. That's the very first thing that I shot as Spencer. I actually split my head open while filming the war stuff. I took a helmet to the face in this scene where I'm just slamming on the guy's throat. I take the helmet off, and I slammed into his neck. We shot the coverage on that from his perspective, and I was kind of in a precarious position.
We shot a tremendous amount of stuff in a very short amount of time with hundreds and hundreds of extras. So you're trying to get everything in one take as best you can. Ben had told me, "Just go feral, be completely feral. Slam this helmet down." I went for it, but just the timing of where the camera was, I had to be very close to the helmet as opposed to when I was doing it in front of me more. In this instance, it was close to my body. I just came right up and smacked the edge of this steel helmet into my face. I was supposed to get like 10, 12 stitches, and I asked them to just superglue it so I could keep filming because I knew we'd have to send everybody home, and it'd be a whole thing. So they just superglued it. I didn't shower for like a week, and the glue dried, and the wound healed, and it was fine.
That helped, honestly, because it was a bad cut. I mean, it was bad and went all the way to the bottom. To have that trauma, to have actually some real trauma to draw from whenever I, as an actor, thought about the war... Moving forward, in any scene, I just imagined myself bleeding all over the set and my head throbbing and thinking I cut my eye open or something. It is an incredibly physical thing to do, though. I mean, the fight scenes and the whole thing was incredibly physical. It's very visceral. So you have some sort of emotional imprint to draw on. That's the long and short of it. [laughs]
In addition to these big, heavy action scenes, Spencer also has a love story. What was it like establishing that rapport with Julia Schlaepfer, and what was it like finding that romance part of his story?
It's such a contrast to who he's been for years, and it was a lot of fun to play with peeling back the onion of this exterior he's built up. For me, he's ultimately just like a little kid. He's just a little kid, and I connected with him. As I've gotten older, I very much realized that I'm just pretty much a little kid most of the time. I don't look like one, but I feel like one a lot. I think finding that in Spencer and bringing that out of him -- because she brings that out of him. So it's like, the longer they're together, the more he kind of sheds this hyper-masculine tough guy exterior that he's put up as a method of survival and sort of shielding himself from his own trauma. She chips away at that, and he comes out more and more as it goes on. Inversely, he finds himself in even more heroic situations as it goes on. So it's this beautiful juxtaposition between becoming more vulnerable but more heroic at the same time. They go hand in hand.
Julia and I were fortunate in that we didn't even chemistry read with each other. No, Taylor just had an intuition, I suppose, that we would get on well, and we did as soon as we met. We just had a very great rapport with each other and natural chemistry as people. We got to spend a couple of months together riding horses and going through the material and prepping, and over that time just got to know each other and became friends. That was the greatest gift because if we didn't get along the way we do as people, it wouldn't be what it is. It shows. We're able to just be present with each other in a way that you just can't be if you're feeling weird with somebody or awkward or tense or whatever it is. It's nice. We can hold that presence for one another as actors in a scene.
Can you talk a bit about filming Spencer's time in Africa? What was it like working with all the big game animals that you worked with, or the green screens that allowed you to?
We had a lion on set and leopards on set. We had a lot of elephants. The elephants are far less dangerous. Julia and I both were in the middle of a scene, [and] to get the elephant to stay near us, it'd be eating oranges out of our hands. You're laying on the ground, looking up at a 10-foot elephant just eating oranges out of your hands. They decide to start running around in circles in the middle of a scene because they're elephants. [laughs] We're just doing this scene, and all of a sudden, they start running around in circles, and everyone's freaking out, [shouting] "Don't run!" You're like, "Alright, I'll just stand here, I guess, while these elephants run in circles." There was an entire herd of seven elephants. They're like, "That's Bubbles." Well, Bubbles weighs 8000 pounds and could trample a Mini Cooper. [laughs] It was great. It's definitely a once-in-a-lifetime situation because it's not often you get to go to Africa and work with elephants and lions.
With Bubbles.
With Bubbles. Bubbles and Snowflake. It's also funny how animals like that always have the most disarming names. They never call them something fitting for their [size]. It's always Bubbles or Cupcake, Snowflake...
You also got to work with some more mundane animals, too. I heard you did the Cowboy Camp ahead of filming in Montana.
Yeah, for a couple of weeks, a month of it.
Jennifer Ehle mentioned that the first time she met you on set, you were filling trash bags up with ice from the ice machine recover from Cowboy Camp.
Oh, yeah. [laughs] That's funny. Yeah, I'm big into cold plunges and ice baths, and my ass was chapped, that's for sure. [laughs] I now know where that expression comes from. There were these townhouses behind the hotel, and I'd take a contractor bag and go to the ice machine in the hotel and fill it with about 30 pounds of ice and dump it into a horse feeding trough. I'd just sit in that thing for about 10 minutes.
Whatever it takes, right?
You gotta do what you gotta do. [laughs]
I'm just about out of time, but I am curious here at the end, what can viewers expect from Spencer for the rest of the season here?
They can expect him to do everything in his power to get home, to protect his family, and to stay with Alex as much as he can.
Catch new episodes of 1923 Sundays on Paramount+.