Everyone has a secret. I know for a fact that the guy scanning items at the grocery store has at least one. The same is true for the woman screaming at her phone in the parking lot. And the neighbors? Your friends? Your emergency contact? I guess some things are better left unknown.

Brandon Sklenar’s character in Paul Feig’s upcoming The Housemaid (based on The New York Times Best Seller by Freida McFadden) presents no exception to this rule—that willful ignorance is by far the best option. In the film, Sklenar plays Andrew Winchester, a wealthy man married to Amanda Seyfried’s manic Nina Winchester. When a younger woman with a criminal background interviews for the live-in housemaid position for the family, skeletons tumble from the closet. In the film, Sklenar certainly harbors some dark secrets, but so does his wife. As does his mother, his daughter, his groundskeeper, and his new housemaid… you get the idea.

It’s not just his character—Sklenar has a few secrets of his own. Take, for example, the two new projects he has coming up. He can’t tell me much about them. Sklenar, a man of the present, would rather share what he’s currently up to, as in, right now. At the time of our Zoom call, he’s on the hunt for some food in Spain, where he’s calling me from. He might visit an ancient Roman city tomorrow on his day off, and he shares that, yesterday, he “got blown up by an IED [on set].”

It was just another day for the grisly Sklenar, who is in Murcia wrapping the first week of his fourth month on set for the upcoming Taylor Sheridan action drama, F.A.S.T. Sheridan (whose oeuvre includes Yellowstone, Special Ops: Lioness, Tulsa King, and Mayor of Kingstown) first tapped Sklenar as Spencer Dutton in the Yellowstone prequel. The series explores the legacy of the Dutton family, the fictional owners of the largest cattle ranch in Montana, and now, the American writer envisions Sklenar trading his neo-Western cowboy hat for a militaristic bulletproof vest.

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Sklenar and Sheridan’s nearly four-year partnership has encouraged Sklenar’s ability to both level up and reach deep, and the 35-year-old actor is proving himself to be quite the leading man, as evidenced by his recent appearance as protagonist Atlas Corrigan in the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, a novel about a woman breaking the cycle of domestic violence. It was a role he almost didn’t take, because it fell into his lap in the midst of filming 1923.

“[Taylor] knew I could do things before I knew I could do things, and he put me in the position for me to learn that of myself,” he says, reminiscing on his first day on the 1923 set. “I would sit there and look at 10 period boats and 400 backgrounds in this crazy environment they built us to play in, and I’d be like, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ Me… I have no track record of being able to do anything like this, but clearly you see this thing in me.”

Since then, he’s watered that “thing” with a madman’s discipline. He took on the challenge of playing the patient and protective Atlas while seeing the two-season 1923 series to its fruition. Even so, Sklenar—who traveled westward from New Jersey after high school for his love of film—still finds himself wonderstruck by the art he creates every day.

Take, for example, when The Housemaid director Feig (of Bridesmaids and A Simple Favor acclaim) sat Sklenar down and asked him to be The Housemaid’s principal guy. Sklenar was tasked with becoming Andrew Winchester—moneyed, charismatic, secretive. The character isn’t exactly the kind of guy Sklenar is used to playing. Andrew is a white-collar, clean-cut, millionaire conservative. Sklenar says he found himself pondering, “Why me?”

But for that very reason, Sklenar said yes, and his performance proves he’s game to jump in with the heavyweights. Starring opposite the legendary Seyfried and the breakout Sweeney, Sklenar holds his own and more, bringing an eruptive physicality to his penned character.

“I really wanted to take what was in the book and turn it up to 11. I just wanted to take all the elements of Andrew and turn them up as much as I could,” Sklenar says, allowing his character to exist between the subtleties of charm and chaos. For audiences, it’s hard not to fall in love with Andrew at the film’s start, but it was hard for Sklenar to even like the guy, which made the performance that much harder.

“I hate the way he dresses. I hate the way he looks and talks. I hate his ethos. I dislike literally everything about this man. So, how do I do it? How do I get inside of him? How do I like him?” he divulges. But, he continues, “[That] is acting, essentially, right? You’re getting this character, and you’re deconstructing it. You’re figuring out his history. You’re trying to fill in the gaps.”

Even in his hate, Sklenar found his way through the door. For The Housemaid, disassociating himself from Andrew Winchester made Sklenar ruthless in his interrogation of the character. He questioned and shattered Andrew’s secret defenses, clawed at what makes the guy tick and pressed on his scars until they revealed his deepest hurts.

Sklenar fought tooth and nail to smoke out Andrew’s clandestine motivations, and when he found them, director Paul Feig gave him the space to let them fly. Sklenar says he found freedom in that release: “The most truthful performances and the most impactful performances aren’t performances. You’re just witnessing someone existing in a space who’s alive and reacting in the moment. In order to get to that place, you need freedom.”

According to him, having that liberty is the best feeling in the world. He describes the magnetic synergy of being on a set where everyone converges on a single moment. “You kind of lose yourself,” he says. “You can feel it in the room, this electricity. And you go, ‘That was the one,’ because the camera pulled focus at the right time. You moved away, and they got you because you had a sixth sense of the camera operator. You added a line, and the other actor listened and responded at the right moment. It just clicks.”

Plus, Sklenar adds, laughing, “It’s pretty fucking hard to not get along with Paul [Feig].”

In the same breath, he mentions the same of co-star Meghann Fahy in Blumhouse’s Drop, which came out earlier this year. The film follows Fahy’s protagonist Violet while an anonymous harasser targets her as the decision-maker of a lethal crisis: Kill her date Henry (played by Sklenar), or let her son and sister die. Similar to The Housemaid, Drop orbits a central, suffocating location, and Sklenar wondered how he’d pull off the tension. To do it, he once again put himself in a position to question what he knows.

“It was like a very specific acting exercise… How can I give this guy a life, and how can I do it all from a chair for an hour and 45 minutes in real time?” he questions, adding that he couldn’t have done it without the excellence of Fahy.

With his primal desire to learn more, get better and up his game, Sklenar knows that if he’s getting in the ring with a character, he’s got to know two things: what he’s up against, and what he’s fighting for. 1923’s Spencer Dutton wants to protect. It Ends With Us’ Atlas Corrigan wants to serve. The Housemaid’s Andrew Winchester wants… well, what he can’t have.

And while it seems like Sklenar’s resume is stacked with “hyper-masculine Hemingway-ass characters,” he reminds me of the secrets people keep.

“You’re always trying to imbue as much vulnerability and as much hardness into all these guys… I’m just trying to get to the core of that as much as possible. What makes them accessible and not just another brooding, tough guy [is] there’s heart and soul,” he says. “Every project is just uncovering a new layer that you can present.”

Everyone has a secret, sure. But they can’t stay in the dark for too long, not when it comes to an interrogator of characters like Brandon Sklenar. He pushes his characters against the ropes. It will only be a matter of time until their truths come out.

Photographed by Juankr

Styled by Freddy Alonso

Written by Julia Zara  

Grooming: Fernando Torrent

Flaunt Film Editor: Daniel Quintero

Styling Assistant: Andrea Ortiz

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