Warning: This article contains spoilers for 1923 season 2, episode 6, “The Mountain Teeth of Monsters.”
1923 star Darren Mann always had a sneaking suspicion that his kindhearted cowboy Jack Dutton might die, but it wasn’t until he cracked open the script for the sixth episode of season 2 that everything suddenly became very real.
“I would look around season 1 at cowboy camp thinking, ‘Knowing a Taylor [Sheridan] show, I wonder how many of us will be left by the end of this.’ Odds are pretty high you might take a bullet in one of his shows, right?” he tells Entertainment Weekly. “So I always kind of suspected that could be a possibility, but I didn’t know until I read episode six and got to that page and thought, ‘Oh, man, that’s how he goes out.’”
It was a tough pill to swallow. “I was sad. I was angry. I was every emotion. I love playing Jack and I want Jack to go on forever,” Mann admits. “That’s such a fun character to get to play, so I was definitely heartbroken by it as well.”
Mann and Brian Geraghty on ‘1923’. Paramount+
After hearing word that Spencer (Brandon Sklenar) is on his way back to Montana, Jack decides to set out on his own for Livingston station knowing that there will likely be a brutal firefight between the Duttons and Whitfield’s (Timothy Dalton) cronies once Spencer’s train arrives. On his journey, he encounters two livestock commission agents who he innocently believes to be on his side, telling them of his plans and his relation to Spencer, only for one of them to suddenly shoot him dead.
It’s a move that Jack never saw coming, Mann says. “He’s a little weary at first, but then he hears agents of the livestock commission [and thinks,] ‘Oh! It’s my guys. It’s all good. They must be just like me. I found some bros and we’re gonna go to the fight together. Now this is awesome,’” he explains. “The idea of them playing both sides and double crossing him — those kind of ideas would never even go through his head. He’s naive in the greatest way, because it comes from a place of heart, not a place of ignorance. He’s doing it with the purest of intentions.”
He adds that Jack’s sudden demise just highlights how quickly and ruthlessly a life can be taken — both in 1923 and in real life. “We all hope for those heroic endings and a huge gunfight, but I think it was artistic and neat and probably more realistic, showing that, no, some people got killed off that easily and that quickly,” he says. “They were that alive before, and then they’re gone.” (To his point, Jack is one of six people who dies in this episode, all for a variety of different reasons.)
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
And, before anyone can criticize Jack’s decision for heading out alone, Mann says he’s not certain that his character would’ve survived even if he had chosen to stay behind or ride to Livingston with Jacob (Harrison Ford). “I still feel like he may have died, just in another way. I could definitely see him sacrificing himself to save someone, that’s very much in his character,” he admits. “I think even going off solo… it’s a dangerous move, but he’s willing to do it for his family, and then maybe it helped. I don’t know, maybe I slowed those guys down just long enough. I hope I did something. I was trying.”
Bringing such an important scene to life, Mann says, was a very daunting experience. “I think that was the most self-conscious I had felt during filming anything of Jack’s, actually. I just love playing Jack so much that I wanted to make sure that I was doing justice to his final moment alive,” he says. “I was just so worried about not doing him right and I wanted to make sure any moment I got that he’s still alive, that I would do it well.”
Jack Dutton. James Minchin III/Paramount+
He recalls “really leaning on [director] Ben Richardson” and the rest of the cast and crew on set that day for support, noting that Richardson was instrumental in helping “remind me that it’s all good to just keep doing my thing” and that there was “no need to be second-guessing” his instincts about how the character would react in the moment.
Jack’s death is made infinitely more heartbreaking given that his wife Elizabeth (Michelle Randolph) spent a portion of this season begging him to leave the ranch behind and move to Boston with her. The pair ultimately agreed to stay in Montana after discovering that they’re expecting their first child together, adding yet another tragic layer to his death.
Mann says Jack’s death is going to be a “hard situation” for Elizabeth to navigate, but that he hopes she’ll stay a member of the Dutton family. “I hope that she can [stay], because it’s like a piece of Jack will always be back there, always be around,” he says. “And I hope that she feels him when she’s around there, and that she’ll just learn to fall in love with that way of life, like Jack loved it, and that it’ll love her back. And that my family will always be there for her.”
He adds that he and his cast mates all had their own “fairytale endings” for how 1923 would eventually come to a close. “Spencer would be back and we get to meet Alex (Julia Schlaepfer), and he and I would run the ranch together, and it would be just this happy family, and we’d be the greatest cattle farmers ever,” he says. “That was how I saw it in my eyes. I guess that’s not quite how the story goes in Taylor’s eyes, though.”
With Jack out of the picture, Mann says he’s open to making an appearance in “any and all” of Sheridan’s other series, including Landman, the Billy Bob Thornton-led Texas oil drama that notably also stars Randolph. “I’m totally down,” he says. “I’m such a fan of his writing, his shows, his movies. I think he’s one of the best storytellers around. So to get to work with him again would be nothing but a pleasure.”
1923 is streaming now on Paramount+.
