‘1923’ Star Julia Schlaepfer Teases ‘Much Darker’ Season 2 of ‘Yellowstone’ Spinoff (Exclusive)

Season 2 of 1923 is taking things to a “much darker” place than ever before. Before the Yellowstone prequel returns with a brand new season on Sunday, Feb. 23, actress Julia Schlaepfer opened up to PopCulture.com about what’s to come for her character Alexandra as she embarks on a harrowing trans-Atlantic journey to find her love, Spencer Dutton (Brandon Sklenar).

“It’s a much darker season. It’s, I would say, an even more epic journey for both [Alexandra and Spencer] — just as many challenges, if not more,” Schlaepfer told PopCulture, adding that at the start of Season 2, her character is “heartbroken, a shell of herself separated from Spencer” and back “trapped in her family home.”

It doesn’t take long for Alexandra to “kick in pretty quickly to planning mode,” Schlaepfer teases: “She promised Spencer she’d meet him in Bozeman and she’s determined to do so. You get to see her really harness the level of grit and determination that maybe we didn’t see as much of in Season 1 as she tries to make her way back to Spencer.”

Getting to play a new side of Alexandra was “so much fun,” Schlaepfer gushed. “She’s a different woman this season. There are so many different new levels to her because she doesn’t have Spencer to save the day. You know, she can’t have her head in the clouds,” she explained. “She’s so focused and faces a lot of challenges that you can imagine a woman in the 1920s on her own would be facing. It’s a very, very scary world that she’s a bit naive to, and it was really exciting to get to map out that arc as an actor.”

Schlaepfer revealed that before she had even received the scripts for Season 2, she received a call from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan. “He called me before he started writing the majority of the season and was like, ‘Okay, this is what I want to put Alex through — it’s going to be really challenging. Are you game? Because it’s going to be difficult,’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”

After receiving all of the scripts, Schlaepfer said she “locked [herself] in a room” to read through them all, and by the end “was just weeping, because it’s so beautiful.” She remembered receiving a call from Sheridan almost immediately after she finished talking logistics and having to tell him, “Taylor, I have to call you back. This is too much. I’ll call you back. I’m too emotional.”

She added, “He’s just as invested and he cares about all these characters so much. So it was really fun to get to work with him on that.”

1923 also stars Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren in addition to Jerome Flynn, Darren Mann, Brian Geraghty, Aminah Nieves, Michelle Randolph, Sebastian Roché, Timothy Dalton and Jennifer Carpenter.

1923 Season 2 premieres Sunday, Feb. 23 on Paramount+, where Season 1 is available for streaming.