“It’s really the perfect movie to see in a movie theater,” says Brandon Sklenar of the new film “Drop,” which will be released Friday. The 34-year-old actor got a taste of just how much audiences liked the movie when it premiered at SXSW, and the room was clinging to every moment.
“You don’t see those movies that much anymore,” Sklenar says.
The movie is the latest in a string of projects that collectively mark Sklenar’s Hollywood breakout: he starred in the now-infamous “It Ends With Us” last year and has been in the series “1923” since 2022 (season two concluded on April 6). Now, he stars in “Drop” alongside Meghann Fahy, a Blumhouse thriller following a single mom who, while on a first date, starts receiving mysterious and threatening airdrops.
Sklenar had long wanted to work with Jason Blum and the Blumhouse team when Blum asked for a meeting to discuss “Drop.”
“It’s what I love to watch when I’m home, not alone, but when I’m at home with my lady; we like to watch a lot of horror movies,” Sklenar says of the genre. “I love campy horror movies. I’ll watch really bad horror movies just because I love them, art house movies, whatever. I just love going on those rides.”
Brandon Sklenar
Sela Shiloh/WWD
The challenge of the movie was that for a horror, it had no gore and no jump scares, but rather leaned into “spooky.”
“How do we create tension and complexity when on the page, it’s just two people being like, ‘hey, do you want calamari?’” he says. “How do I as the actor playing that guy make it interesting and make him a real guy? So yeah, it was more of the challenge for me of how I pull that off, which was not something I’d ever done before.”
Sklenar plays Henry, the guy Fahy’s character goes on the date with, which he found to be a refreshing role reversal.
“If this movie was made 20, 30 years ago, she would’ve been the damsel in distress who doesn’t know what’s going on and the man would’ve been the heroic character in that element. But in this sense, I am effectively the damsel in distress who doesn’t know what’s happening,” he says. “She’s the powerhouse hero in the film as she should be, and that’s a really cool element of it. And I’m here for it, for sure.”
Brandon Sklenar
Sela Shiloh/WWD
Sklenar plays Spencer Dutton on “1923,” the “Yellowstone” prequel series. Prior to joining the show, he was obviously aware of the blockbuster original series, but had long been a fan of creator Taylor Sheridan’s other work.
“I’ve seen ‘Sicario’ probably a dozen times, and I’ve seen ‘Hell or High Water’ and ‘Wind River’ many times, and he has such a particular voice in his writing,” Sklenar says. “Every great writer, whether it be literature or film, they have a very specific voice, and through the way I grew up and my influences in film and literature, I just get his voice and his tone.”
Those influences include writers like Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard and Hollywood icons like Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen — “these really iconic old-school, masculine archetypes.”
“Taylor has a similar sort of voice as a Sam Shepard or Eugene,” Sklenar says. “[There are] a lot of parallels there in terms of how he translates Americana and American history and this Western sort of vibe.”
On a more personal level, Sklenar had grown up with grandparents on both sides who introduced him to Western movies.
“My mom’s dad was a big Western guy and was a proud card-carrying NRA member and was very in that world. And my dad’s dad wore bolo ties and cowboy boots and was also a big Western guy,” Sklenar says. “I grew up watching those films like ‘The Searchers’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ and all Clint’s films.”
Brandon Sklenar
Sela Shiloh/WWD
Since joining “1923,” he’s become acutely aware of just how global the “Yellowstone” world is.
“I was in a tiny little Italian restaurant on Lake Como and had several people in that restaurant be like, ‘I love Yellowstone,’” he says. “I’m always surprised. I’m like, ‘oh, wow, you watched that show?’ I was in Amsterdam and had it happen with locals, and it’s really only there did I start to realize the scope of it.”
Sklenar has just wrapped shooting “The Housemaid” with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, and has a project that begins filming in the fall; in the meantime, he’s looking forward to hitting pause for the first time in 10 months.
“I am taking a little bit of a break, to be a guy, not an actor, and just live life,” he says.
That said, he won’t be sitting back for too long — he needs a challenge to feel “useful,” both professional and personally.
“What excites me the most is whatever demands the most of me, really. I love just losing myself in a process and I love any reason to work really hard at something and feel useful,” he says. “I like applying myself to something as much as I can — and that’s just like as a person, that’s what gets me up in the morning and that’s what keeps me alive and motivated. If I don’t have something to do like that, and this is just a very baseline level, not even considering when it comes to the work, but just generally as a human, I need that to function. So when I’m looking at what I want to do, it’s something I can really dive into and something that challenges me and pushes me physically and emotionally and that requires a lot of work. I like doing it. I really do. It’s my favorite thing in the world to do.”