‘1923’ star Brandon Sklenar talks Spencer Dutton’s emotional connection to Elsa

Taylor Sheridan’s growing Dutton universe is expanding even more complex with the addition of his latest Yellowstone prequel, 1923, and the series is exploring the complexity of the lives of the Duttons of days past. One of the characters who quickly stole our hearts is Brandon Sklenar’s Spencer Dutton, and he’s sharing a beautiful sentiment on family ties and how we honor them without even knowing it.

Speaking to Den of Geek, Sklenar says there’s a deeply interwoven storyline between Spencer and Elsa, even though the siblings never met. There are so many traits that Elsa brought to 1883, in a fearless and vulnerable storyline, that Spencer brings to audiences in 1923. It’s a beautiful connection — it’s otherworldly.

“It’s just such a gift to put this puzzle together and see where you can layer in Elsa, because there’s so much of her in Spencer, and yet they never met each other. But he has that same quest for danger. He’s also so unintentionally poetic. He’s such a simple guy. Taylor’s writing is so beautiful in that respect, and he has no awareness of how poetic and romantic he is. It’s just fundamentally who he is. So there’s something so endearing about that quality.”

While one might not initially think of the word romantic when they imagine the complex storyline of the Dutton family, it’s the most central and authentic way to describe what’s unfolding in front of us. It’s a love letter in every sense of the word: beautiful, broken, fractured, healed — it’s every stage of love and all of its romantic notions.

Sklenar went on to speak about the Dutton men and the traits he loves most about them, and a lot of it has to deal with how he stands up for those he loves and how they’re all connected by such integrally laced pieces of their personalities.

“There was a discussion about how the men in the Dutton family communicate and how they handle and compose themselves. There is this generational way of dealing with things and showing up as a man in the world. There’s a nobility that I really love about Spencer. A throughline in a lot of these [Dutton men] is doing whatever they can to show up for their family and the people they love. It’s just a noble trait, but there’s a very specific masculine presence or vibe, and you can tell that they’re all cut from the same cloth.”

Fans of the Yellowverse can attest to that; all of the Dutton family men are cut from the same cloth, and they carry with them a regal sense of existing in a world that overlooks their way of life. They’re not to be discarded for their cowboying and ranch hand lifestyle, no — they find pride and resilience in it, and that’s a lesson Spencer will undeniably learn when he returns to the ranch when 1923 comes back next month.