Brandon Sklenar is a chill guy—he spent the pandemic in a bungalow, tripping on mushrooms and writing music. He’s also a bit of a daredevil, doing all his own stunts on 1923, the Taylor Sheridan–created Western that made him a star. And he’s got a romantic side too, playing the other guy caught between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni in It Ends With Us. In Drop, Sklenar’s new movie about a date from hell, he sort of combines all three, trying to uncover who exactly is sending digital threats to the woman he met on an app. But who is he, really? Sydney Sweeney, his costar in the upcoming thriller The Housemaid, called him up to find out.

———

THURSDAY 5 PM FEB. 27, 2025 LA

BRANDON SKLENAR: Hey.

SYDNEY SWEENEY: Hey.

SKLENAR: I can’t see you.

SWEENEY: You can’t see me? I see you.

SKLENAR: Oh, there you are. Hey.

SWEENEY: Hey.

SKLENAR: Hey.

SWEENEY: Hi.

SKLENAR: [Laughs] What’s up?

SWEENEY: What are you doing?

SKLENAR: Just got back from the gym. I’m sitting, just trying to prop my phone up.

SWEENEY: Nice. So I was thinking of asking you a bunch of spitfire questions, if that’s okay.

SKLENAR: Yeah.

SWEENEY: Okay. So my first one is, what’s the most ridiculous thing that you recently googled?

SKLENAR: Fuck, hang on. I have to think about it for a second. There was something just yesterday that I looked up that was pretty weird. Ask me the next question while I think about it.

SWEENEY: Pass, pass, pass. Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses?

SKLENAR: One horse-sized duck, for sure.

SWEENEY: If your personality was a cocktail, what would it be?

SKLENAR: Whiskey sour.

SWEENEY: If you were on a pizza date, what’s the absolute worst thing someone could put on a pizza?

SKLENAR: Mushrooms.

SWEENEY: What’s your most irrational fear?

SKLENAR: Snakes.

SWEENEY: What’s the dumbest way you’ve ever injured yourself?

SKLENAR: Probably splitting my own head open with a helmet shooting a scene in 1923. That was pretty dumb.

SWEENEY: How did you do that?

SKLENAR: I was having to slam it down on this dude’s neck as he’s trying to kill me. And when we actually shot it, I had the helmet far enough in front of me to have some clearance. Then we had to shoot from his point of view, of me slamming it on his neck, and because of the angle I had to hold the helmet really close to me, and we had one shot, so the director told me to just go really ape-shit on it. So I came up and hit myself right here under my eye and just totally split my head open. They had to superglue it. Yeah.

SWEENEY: You have a scar now?

SKLENAR: I do. I got a pretty good scar right next to another scar that I already had there. But yeah, they had to CGI it into the other stuff we had already shot before, and now he just has this head wound the entire season if you look closely.

SWEENEY: Interesting fact.

SKLENAR: Yeah. I’m still thinking of the weirdest thing I’ve googled recently. Let me just look real quick.

SWEENEY: Alright.

SKLENAR: I think it was like the origins of some word. That’s what it was. Trying to find it. Fuck, I can’t.

SWEENEY: You keep looking, and I’ll give you the next one. If someone made a terrible action figure of you, what would your main accessory be?

SKLENAR: Probably the Smokey [Mountain] pouch I lost in New York. That would be a terrible accessory, but it would also make a lot of sense because I’m trying to not smoke anymore.

SWEENEY: If you only could speak in movie quotes, what movies would you pull from?

SKLENAR: Dumb and Dumber. I could recite that entire movie shamelessly.

SWEENEY: You know every single movie quote.

SKLENAR: I know. My knowledge of movies is dumb and vast, and it takes up most of my brain. And I’m really good with history in general, and film history.

SWEENEY: Why do you think you’re so obsessed with film history?

SKLENAR: I like knowing how things are made and why they’re made, and if I’m interested in something, I can retain a lot of information. If I’m not interested in it, I can’t remember fucking anything. If I’m in an old building, I’ll google the address and try to read about it. Or any place I’m filming, I’ll read all about when the town was established, who was the first mayor, if there’s any famous battles that took place there.

SWEENEY: That’s really cool. Okay, I’m going to ask you serious questions now. So you have a pretty big year. You have 1923, you have Drop, and then you have our movie The Housemaid.

SKLENAR: Yes.

SWEENEY: How do you decide which roles you want to do?

SKLENAR: There’s some roles that are more strategic in terms of the long game. I try and limit that amount of work, but sometimes it’s necessary. And if that’s the case, you find whatever you can to hook into it on the deepest creative level. But mostly, things that challenge me in a way I haven’t been challenged before. Also, now it’s who I’m working with, whether it be the director or an actor. People I want to learn from.

SWEENEY: Who would you want to learn from?

SKLENAR: I’d love to work with Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s been my favorite director my whole life. Man, it’d be a dream to work with Tarantino. You’ve worked with him.

SWEENEY: You’d like his vibe. Do you feel like you learned a lot from Taylor Sheridan? You always talk about him and you love him so much.

SKLENAR: Absolutely. His decisiveness and his commitment to his own vision, and not letting anybody interfere with that, is very rare. It’s a big reason he’s been able to produce the work at the rate he’s able to produce it, because he doesn’t let anyone interfere. You really have to believe in what you’re making in order to do that, and he really believes in what he makes.

SWEENEY: One of my favorite things you told me when we were working together was how confident you were when you were auditioning for Spencer Dutton [Sklenar’s character in 1923], and how you knew that it was going to be you. Have there been any other moments that you’ve felt that with a role?

SKLENAR: Yeah. When I auditioned for Edward Mapplethorpe. I did this little movie about Robert Mapplethorpe, and I played his brother. That was the only other time I’ve had that feeling. I just knew I was going to get it. But I’ve never had anything like Spencer before. The first time I read it, the hairs on my arm stood up, and I just was like, “Yeah, this is mine. No one else can do this.” And not from a sense of arrogance. It’s just a really calm sort of belief. [Laughs]

SWEENEY: What made you love Spencer so much?

SKLENAR: On paper, he’s the coolest character on any television show out, in my opinion. He’s a big game hunter. He’s a World War I–decorated hero. He’s a cowboy. He’s a lover. He’s a fighter. He has a strong moral compass, and he’s a great guy. And he’s sort of the embodiment of this old-school, masculine archetype that you don’t really see at all in contemporary media. But he’s imbued with a very modern sense of himself. He’s self-aware and he’s vulnerable. As a young man, he’s kind of everything you want in a character.

SWEENEY: Do you feel like you are attracted more towards characters that are in period pieces, or do you want to try more modern stuff?

SKLENAR: Modern stuff is cool, but I prefer period stuff for sure. There’s just so much more to pull from. You’ve done a bunch of them.

SWEENEY: Because you can immerse yourself in the world more.

SKLENAR: Exactly. Your imagination can run away with it. You get to research about the period and change your voice. And it’s not arbitrary. It’s not like, “Let me change my voice and show you how cool I can sound.” It’s motivated by history. The little kid in you just has a field day when you show up on a set and it’s head-to-toe a hundred years ago, and everywhere you look is a hundred years ago—cars, horses, dirt roads, costumes, everything.

SWEENEY: Have you ever wanted to take something from a character back with you, like a memento?

SKLENAR: I steal stuff all the time. I took Spencer’s hat and his passport and his war patches. I ripped them off of my wardrobe. Yeah. Some bullet casings from the machine gun that I fire in the World War I scenes.

SWEENEY: Did you take anything from Drop?

SKLENAR: I think I took a menu.

SWEENEY: What about The Housemaid?

SKLENAR: I don’t know that I did take anything from The Housemaid.

SWEENEY: You played a pretty dark character, so that makes sense.

SKLENAR: Yeah, he’s a pretty twisted guy.

SWEENEY: Did you do all of your own stunts in 1923?

SKLENAR: I did. I think Jake [Dashnaw] did one where he had to carry Julia [Schlaepfer] up a fake snow embankment, and they were worried about my boots slipping out. But I did everything else, I’m pretty sure.

SWEENEY: Do you want to continue doing your own stunts?

SKLENAR: Yeah, I love using my body. I’m really good at it. I grew up fighting and doing construction. If I don’t use my body in some way, I feel pretty underutilized.

SWEENEY: If you look back on your life, has there been a moment that you’re incredibly proud of?

SKLENAR: If I’m being completely honest, no. That’s something I struggle with. I don’t really allow myself to ever feel that, but it also pushes me to work really hard. I’m working on that, though. It’s important to do.

SWEENEY: I don’t know if it’s something everybody has to do. My friends are always like, “Sydney, have you taken a second to see everything that’s going on around you?” I love always wanting to keep working harder and achieving more.

SKLENAR: So have you had that moment yourself?

SWEENEY: No.

SKLENAR: Yeah. I don’t know if I ever will.

SWEENEY: I don’t think I will.

SKLENAR: I could win an Oscar and I’d probably be like, “Really? You sure?”

SWEENEY: Like, “Am I supposed to be here?”

SKLENAR: But I think it’s a good quality to have. You don’t want to smell your own shit too much, you know what I mean?

SWEENEY:[Laughs] Okay, sure. How do you want to be remembered? Not as an actor, but as a person?

SKLENAR: I’d say as a thoughtful, caring, hardworking person.

SWEENEY: And as an actor?

SKLENAR: Oh, the greatest of all time [Laughs]

SWEENEY: Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.

SKLENAR: I’m just kidding. I don’t really care, to be honest. We’re all going to die, and none of it really matters. What you make matters, but that’s not something I ever think about, because even if I have the best career I could possibly dream of, and people watch my films long after I’m gone, I’m not going to be around to feel anything about it, so it doesn’t really concern me.

SWEENEY: That’s really interesting. I mean, there has to be something where it draws you to different characters and you want to make sure people remember you through them.

SKLENAR: Obviously my ego would love to be remembered on some level, and I want to have films that live on, but I try not to spend too much time in that part of my mind, if that makes sense.

SWEENEY: Is there a role or a movie or something that you dream of doing?

SKLENAR: I really love doing biopics. I love playing real people more than anything.

SWEENEY: You love history.

SKLENAR: I’d love to play Kris Kristofferson; I’d love to play Waylon Jennings.

SWEENEY: You have quite a love for music.

SKLENAR: I’m a big music guy.

SWEENEY: You’ve always had a guitar.

SKLENAR: I have a guitar problem. I buy them often.

SWEENEY: But sometimes you don’t keep them.

SKLENAR: I like to buy them and play them and then sell them. But I’ve recently whittled it down to a select few I think I’ll hold onto for a while.

SWEENEY: Do you write your own music?

SKLENAR: I do. I haven’t done it in a long time, but when Covid was happening, I had a lot of time alone in my little bungalow I was in at the time,  in Valley Village, and I was eating a lot of mushrooms and making a lot of music and running on the beach. It was a really nice time. It was obviously a very chaotic and sad time, but that was the brighter aspect of it.

SWEENEY: Nice. Now I have to talk about your projects more in depth.

SKLENAR: Hit me.

SWEENEY: Drop takes place on a single night in a single location. Sometimes it can create something that feels very suffocating, and there’s a sense of dread. How did you shape your approach to your character when it all was having to do with one particular beat?

SKLENAR: That’s a very good question. Henry on the page is not the most complex, in the sense that he’s a man on a date, and he’s trying to figure out what’s going on with this woman that he genuinely connects with. So I try to ground him in reality as much as possible and find as many nuances in him as I could in terms of—

SWEENEY: Well, I felt like you made him super compassionate and caring. You understood what she was going through and you were there for her. There were a lot of layers and it was deep.

SKLENAR: Oh, thank you. I tried.

SWEENEY: Have you ever been on a real-life date that went terribly wrong?

SKLENAR: Yeah, for sure. I was on a date with a girl once, and we didn’t vibe at all. She had an Apple Watch, and I hate Apple Watches. I think they’re the tackiest thing. She kept checking her Apple Watch and then also had her phone on the bar and kept checking her phone. I was like, it’s literally the same thing on your phone that’s on your watch. And she would be in the middle of a conversation and then check her text messages while she was talking to me, on her watch. It was the rudest thing in the world.

SWEENEY: It really stuck with you, though.

SKLENAR: This is seven or eight years ago. I was so blown away by her connection to her technology and how unaware she was of how hooked she was on it.

SWEENEY: I hope she doesn’t read this.

SKLENAR: Yeah, who knows?

SWEENEY: For 1923, they say that you made the conscious decision to physically bulk up for the role. Did you?

SKLENAR: For season two I did, yeah. He’s been shoveling coal for four months, and knowing where he was going physically and how much violence he would be subjected to, I wanted to feel stronger and more intimidating, a bit more like an animal.

SWEENEY: Do you like physically changing for roles?

SKLENAR: Yeah, I do it for pretty much everything I do, even if it’s subtle. You just did that to play [boxer] Christy Martin. You had a pretty insane transformation for that role.

SWEENEY: It’s fun. You get to completely lose yourself.

SKLENAR: That must’ve felt pretty fucking crazy to see yourself like that.

SWEENEY: It did. I don’t think I realized how much I’d changed until the day I wrapped. I remember looking in the mirror going, “Oh, fuck. Now I have to carry this as Sydney,” where before it was like, “It’s for Christy.”

SKLENAR: I think it’s fucking remarkable what you did for that role, truly. I can’t wait for people to see that.

SWEENEY: Thank you. Well, it was really fun talking to you, Brandon.

SKLENAR: You too, Sydney.

———

Grooming: Anna Bernabe using YSL Beauty at Kalpana.

Set Design: Samuel Keamy-Minor.

Fashion Assistants: Will Singleton and Danielle Sims.

Location: AGP West Studios.