Mitchell Slaggert Likes to Be Nervous

After a decade of modeling, Mitchell Slaggert is not shy about showing some skin—one of his first major jobs, after all, was a 2016 Calvin Klein Underwear campaign alongside Kendall Jenner—but he was still somewhat taken aback when he was asked to appear on stage in just a jockstrap for the season finale of Taylor Sheridan’s hit series Landman earlier this year. “I was just like, ‘Is this some sort of Magic Mike thing? Am I going have to get some training how to do this?’” he laughs. But when he learned the full context of the scene—his character, the high school football star Ryder, is trying to earn a night with his girlfriend Ainsley by putting on a show for a group of senior citizens she volunteers with—he immediately appreciated the comedic potential. “I’m like, ‘Oh, this is actually funny. He’s not really stripping, it’s just a deer-in-the-headlights situation and he’s basically naked on stage,’” he recalls. “I reached out to my mother and my sisters and they all said, ‘Oh, that’s hilarious, do it.’”

Throughout his career, both as a model and now as a rising actor, Slaggert has always similarly thrown himself headfirst into any opportunity that came his way. After being scouted on the street in Wilmington, North Carolina, by the casting director Daniel Peddle, he soon found himself on the plane to Milan to walk the runway for Calvin Klein and quickly became a frequent face in editorials and campaigns. Peddle, a film director as well, soon cast him as the lead in his 2018 coming-of-age film Moss, in which Slaggert plays a teenager facing grief and other complicated emotions on his eighteenth birthday in his acting debut. “I thought about what I have to do and I was like, ‘This is a little strange, I don’t know if I’m going to like this,’” he recalls about first being approached by Peddle to star in his movie. “Thankfully, through that project, I got bit by the acting bug. It’s this natural high you get. You nail it and you’re like, ‘Oh, that felt good, alright, let’s do it again. How many takes do you need?’”

Since then, Slaggert has been fully focused on shaping himself into a well-rounded actor, taking years of classes and finding success in a range of projects, from the HBO comedy series The Sex Lives of College Girls—in which he played the object of much lust and, later, the attention of Pauline Chalamet’s Kimberly—to last year’s Lifetime movie A Carpenter Christmas Romance opposite Sasha Pieterse. But it is his role in Landman, alongside heavyweights including Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore, and Jon Hamm, that has further established him as one to watch.

Set on the oil rigs of West Texas, Landman follows Thornton’s Tommy Norris, a fixer of sorts at M-Tex Oil as he deals with a series of personal and professional crises, from a cartel running drugs across the drilling fields to complicated relationships with his ex-wife and daughter (Ryder’s girlfriend). Slaggert says he was instantly drawn to the project by the pedigree of Sheridan, who wrote several celebrated films including Sicario and Hell or High Water before creating the hit series Yellowstone. “I essentially knew it was another Taylor Sheridan show, and that guy is just a savant,” Slaggert recalls of first hearing about the project. “He’s just a wizard with everything he touches, and so I was really stoked.”

After spending the duration of the months-long SAG-AFTRA strike in 2023 taking acting classes on a nearly daily basis, Slaggert says he felt ready for the challenge of joining his largest production yet. “I was very confident, I knew I was ready,” he says of his training. “I’m also fortunate where I don’t get starstruck, but it was definitely nerve-wracking stepping into it because you’re running with these heavy hitters now and you’re like, ‘Okay, alright, this is where all the work that you’ve been doing gets put to the test and it’s sink or swim.’”

Holding his own opposite Thornton (Slaggert’s first scene in the series features Tommy finding him in the flatbed of a truck with Ainsley, with expectedly dramatic results), the thirty-year-old actor quickly became a fan favorite as Ryder expanded beyond the jock stereotype into a surprisingly thoughtful character. The series has been renewed for a second season, and although Slaggert’s return has not yet been announced, he is level-headed about his future. “This is an interesting industry and you can’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he explains. “I’ve come very close to a bunch of other parts where I didn’t get it and neither did anybody else who I was up against. So you don’t get your hopes up and you just keep on rolling the dice.”

In the meantime, he is splitting his time between Los Angeles and North Carolina, spending as much time as he can outdoors and turning his hand to carpentry, often featuring his creations on his Instagram account. “I have a lot of beautiful trees on the property, and my girlfriend asked for a coffee table recently, so I made her one. It turned out great, and then some people reached out saying that they want one, so I might just start selling furniture,” he laughs.

And he continues to prepare himself for any opportunity that might come his way, although he says he is particularly excited about the prospect of challenging himself with some new genres. “I’m waiting for the day I can land an action role because I love that,” he says. “The dramas are great. It’s good to stretch your acting muscles and go to those deep dark places. It’s nice to know you can go there, but it’s not necessarily fun to go there too often.” Until then, Slaggert promises he’ll keep pushing himself out of his own comfort zone, and reveling in whatever he might find there. “I like being nervous,” he adds, “because it means you’re doing something important.”