Young Lloyd On Yellowstone Was Played By Forrie J. Smith's Real-Life Son

Forrie J. Smith got into acting in a very unusual way: through rodeo. According to an interview the actor did with Scott Breen, Smith was involved in rodeos in the '80s when some of his friends in the scene convinced him to try acting. He went out to a casting call where they needed someone to lasso a man off of a roof, and Smith got the role by virtue of being the only one to show up at the audition with the correct length of rope. Smith started out doing mainly stunt work and was first given a speaking role when a production needed him to ride beside an actor who struggled to ride a horse.

On "Yellowstone," Smith has been playing Lloyd, the old-timer in the bunkhouse, since Season 1, and he's become a very popular character among fans. In a 2021 thread about Lloyd in the r/YellowstonePN subreddit, u/doirelyneedausername commented, "If [Lloyd] dies, I boycott the set for his return." Redditor u/FrankSmall pointed out that Lloyd is probably safe since the actor is also one of the wranglers on set. IMDb does list the actor as a wrangler on the sets of some productions, but he's not listed as a wrangler for "Yellowstone."

In the same thread, u/BigMommaSnikle expressed a desire to see more of Lloyd's background, and u/TonySpangs508 remarked on how much the actor who plays young Lloyd in flashbacks looks like Smith. Well, it turns out that there's a very good reason why the actor looks so much like Smith, and it's because the actor is Smith's own son.

A younger version of Lloyd can be seen in flashback scenes on "Yellowstone" going back to the Season 2 episode "Touching Your Enemy." But his first time speaking came in the Season 5 premiere "One Hundred Years is Nothing" in a flashback scene where a young Beth (Kylie Rogers) and a young Rip (Kyle Red Silverstein) head into town for a date before Beth heads off for college. "Not one good thing happens in town, Rip" the younger Lloyd warns in the flashback. "Not one good thing." 

According to IMDb, Young Lloyd is played by an actor named Forrest Wilder in that episode. However, the character is played by someone listed as Forrest Smith in the Season 2 episode. It would appear that these actors are one and the same (Forrie J. Smith refers to his son as "Wilder" in this Instagram post), and the man behind the present-day version of Lloyd is making sure that everyone knows that was his son playing the younger version of his character on "Yellowstone."

In November 2022, the elder Smith took to Instagram to post an article about his son playing the younger version of his character. "Just in case you didn't know this ..." he wrote, before thanking series creator Taylor Sheridan for the casting choice. Fans remarked that the uncanny resemblance made a lot more sense now that they know the actors are father and son.