Brandon Sklenar is bawling his eyes out. It’s 2022, he’s thirty-one years old, and he just left the biggest audition of his life: 1923, the

Yellowstone prequel from TV kingpin Taylor Sheridan. The adrenaline is surging through his body, so Sklenar races to the bathroom—a

space to breathe. Rejection hits heavy and often in acting, which he knows painfully well, but this time is different. He can feel with a rare certainty that his hard work has finally paid off, and he’s overcome with relief.

 

 

“You really feel like Sisyphus pushing this monumental boulder up the hill,” Sklenar tells me now. “Like you’re the only person that can see why you keep doing it.” Now thirty-five, he’s sitting in a patch of grass in New York City on a break from production on his latest film. He’s

 

 

multitasking, talking with me while rolling a cigarette as he reminisces about a day he will never forget. “I left the room and called my dad like, ‘I fucking got this,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘I’m pretty fucking sure.’ ”

 

 

Five minutes after he left the audition, Sheridan confirmed the actor’s suspicions. After grinding out bit parts in Vice and Westworld, Sklenar would finally star in his own series—a period western for Paramount costarring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. Fast-forward three years and now he’s racking up more roles than he can count.

But it’s 1923’s Spencer Dutton—a World War I hero who travels across the world to return home and save his family’s Montana ranch—who started it all. Spencer’s adventure required an earnestness that only someone as green and determined to prove himself as Sklenar could bring. Over a two-season arc, the actor turned himself into a modern-day Clint Eastwood. Plus, 1923 forged a powerful new partnership between Sklenar and Sheridan, who became one of the most successful TV creatives of the past decade as Yellowstone shattered Paramount viewership records. “Anyone is lying to you if they say they didn’t need some sort of validation along the way,” Sklenar says.

A few months ago, Sheridan phoned Sklenar with good news once again. He’d landed a deal with Warner Bros. to write an action movie for 2027 titled F.A.S.T., and he couldn’t imagine anyone else as the star. “He told me, ‘I don’t want to do this without you,’ ” Sklenar says. Taking a drag, Sklenar has a shocked, swooning expression on his face, as if Sheridan had gotten down on one knee and proposed. “Again, I was fighting back tears,” he says. “I will forever have so much love and gratitude for that man. It’s like he saw what I was capable of before I knew I was capable of it. That just doesn’t happen.”

The call came as Sklenar was filming The Housemaid, a psychological thriller that hits theaters December 19. The film follows a live-in maid (Sydney Sweeney) who butts heads with her new employer (Amanda Seyfried) before turning into a home-wrecker with the woman’s patient husband (Sklenar). Following a colossal twist that upends the entire movie, Sklenar is finally allowed to break out of his shell and flex his dark side.

For audiences unfamiliar with his work, The Housemaid serves as a violent and surprising departure from his role as Spencer Dutton. The actor tells me that he intended to hold a mirror to Spencer’s perfect visage of Hollywood masculinity. “I just never played a character like that,” he says. “He’s just so awful, but he loves it. He’s the exact opposite of how you should be, and he’s having the time of his life being this absolute lunatic. That sounded exciting, and a little scary. I’m usually pretty contained. So I got to really paint with some broad strokes.”