For 30 years on screen, Zahn McClarnon — stone-faced, soft-spoken and simmering with a quiet intensity — has made a name for himself, largely by playing some pretty tough characters.
There was the murderous strip club owner in “Ringer”; the ferocious and tortured android Akecheta, leader of the Ghost Nation, in HBO’s “Westworld”; and the menacing Hanzee Dent, a ruthless killer in the FX series “Fargo”. The list continues.
So you can’t blame a younger actor for feeling a little intimidated, like Kiowa Gordon, 32, did before co-starring with McClarnon in the new AMC six-part mystery “Dark Winds,” which debuts Sunday. They’d worked together before on the Sundance series “The Red Road,” but McClarnon’s decades of experience and thousand-foot staring had lost none of their strength.
“Is this man going to kill me?” Gordon smiled back at the prospect of working with McClarnon again. “Is he a robot?”
Not that killer robots can’t be charming. “He just got looks like scary,” their “Dark Winds” co-star Jessica Matten said later, also laughing. She added: “But he is the sweetest man on planet Earth.”
For Gordon and Matten, who are both of Indigenous descent, ‘Dark Winds’ was an opportunity to work closely with a giant among Indigenous film actors. For McClarnon, 55, whose decades of bustle paved the way for an emerging new generation of Native actors, the show is his first starring role in a regular TV series and his first series as an executive producer — the kind of firsts that feel good on any experience level. .
The show is also special to McClarnon, who is of Lakota and Irish descent, because of its cast and crew: nearly the entire cast is Native—a rarity to say the least—as is its creator, Graham Roland (“Tom Clancy’s Jack Rianne” ); the entire writer’s room; and much of the other crew, from the assistants to the props department.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the role seems to be his favorite to date: “I mean, if I was put on the spot,” McClarnon said.
“You’re looking at the show from the perspective of people who grew up with their culture and who understand what it’s like to live on the reservation,” added McClarnon, who grew up on reservations. “They understand the nuances, the relationships, the humor.”
McClarnon plays Joe Leaphorn, a veteran Navajo Tribal Police officer and half of the native crime-solving duo Leaphorn & Chee, the protagonists of a long-running series of mystery novels by Tony Hillerman. Gordon plays the other half, Jim Chee, Leaphorn’s newly arrived deputy. The story follows them and Bernadette Manuelito (Matten), a Navajo police sergeant who often prefers horses to humans, as they investigate a horrific double murder complicated by an armored car robbery that may have involved an indigenous militant group.
This is the first time McClarnon has starred in a Leaphorn & Chee adaptation; the others consist of four feature films (“The Dark Wind”, “Skinwalkers”, “Coyote Waits” and “A Thief of Time”) and starred some of Hollywood’s most successful Native actors, including Adam Beach, Tantoo Cardinal , Graham Greene and Wes Studi.
In a video interview from his Los Angeles home last month, McClarnon was funny and humble—perhaps even self-deprecating. When asked about his happiness, he attributed much of it to the help of others and (no kidding) his punctuality.
You got the sense that his success was more than that as he talked about his nomadic childhood (his father worked for the National Park Service), his early days in Los Angeles, and his long road to ‘Dark Winds’.
Born in Denver, McClarnon spent much of his early life hopscotch through the Midwest, with stops in Yellowstone and Glacier National Park. “I grew up in the Park Service, actually,” he said.
He described himself as a “rambunctious kid” – “I didn’t like school much,” he admitted – he fell in love with acting in Iowa after landing a small role as an apostle in a local production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
“They wanted people with long hair, and of course they wanted to include people of color as well,” he said. “So that’s pretty much why I got that job.”
McClarnon was hooked on the camaraderie and the ovations. After appearing in a few local commercials — shooting hoops in one, playing a construction worker in the other — he moved to Los Angeles in 1991 to pursue his career. It was a time of great promise for native actors.
“‘Dances with Wolves’ had come out, and there were productions looking for Native American actors,” he said. He found a collective in Los Angeles called First Americans in the Arts, a group of actors tied together by a national casting registry, including Julius Drum (“Thunderheart”); Steve Reevis (“Dancing with Wolves,” “Fargo” by the Coen Brothers); and Studi (“The Last of the Mohicans”).
Several of them shared an apartment in Hollywood and often tried out the same roles. “We gave each other a ride to auditions, we went out with pow wows,” he said. “Of course there was competition, but we were all happy that everyone was working.”
Despite all that, it was hard to avoid roles that played on stereotypes — “I look a certain way, so I played Latino gangbanger roles as well as native roles,” McClarnon said — but he made the most of every part. whatever it was or however small. His sharp cheekbones and tormented eyes indeed radiated a subtle ferocity that was hard to forget. (DailyExpertNews critic Mike Hale recently described him as “that man you remember, even though his name was way up the cast list.”)
“Zahn has a very expressive face and a beautiful way of communicating a lot without saying anything,” said Roland, creator of “Dark Winds.” “There is tremendous pathos for him.”
By the time McClarnon landed “Dark Winds,” he had starred in more than 80 movies and TV shows together, including, most recently, the critically acclaimed FX on Hulu dramedy “Reservation Dogs,” in which McClarnon plays the hard-hearted but meek officer. Big. There’s that quiet intensity again.
“There’s a gravitas, man,” said Chris Eyre, who directed four episodes of “Dark Winds.” (His credits include directing 1998’s “Smoke Signals,” the first feature film written, directed, and performed by Native Americans to receive widespread theatrical distribution.) “Zahn has this feeling for him, based on his own experience as a Native and his decades of film and television work.”
The list of the show’s executive producers includes Eyre, Robert Redford, and George RR Martin, all of whom are residents of Santa Fe. Eyre met Redford, who was an executive producer on the earlier Leaphorn & Chee adaptations, through the Sundance Institute Directors Lab in 1995, and the two remained friends. Martin met author Hillerman in the 1980s through a New Mexico writers’ club, and was a big fan of his work.
“A light bulb went out,” Eyre said. “It was about 2015, 2016, and we all sat down and started kicking the idea of bringing Hillerman back to life.”
McClarnon secured the role of Leaphorn before the show was even greenlit. “Honestly, I’m not sure we would have sold the project to AMC if Zahn wasn’t involved,” Roland said. “He was a big part of our sales pitch.”
The series was finally picked up in July 2021 and production started the following month. McClarnon started to put people at ease.
“On our first day on ‘Dark Winds’, he tells the crew, ‘I want to let everyone know, even if I look grumpy, I’m not,’” Matten said with a laugh. “‘It’s just a process.’ And it’s so true. There’s not a mean bone in that man’s body.”
“I’ve heard stories where many leads don’t really welcome the input of their co-stars, unfortunately,” she continued. “But he’s smart and understands what this does for our indigenous peoples, and how it will affect all of us in the long run.”
Gordon had a similar experience on set; the three leads bonded over the three-month production, he said, and they’ve stayed in touch since it ended. “Well, when he’s home,” Gordon clarified. “Sometimes he just takes weeks off and rides his motorcycle across the country.”
McClarnon is currently working on several projects, including the Disney+ Marvel series “Echo,” due out next year, in which he will reprise the role of the titular superhero’s father, whom he played in the “Hawkeye” series. It’s just the kind of role he’d like to play more.
“I’m finally getting to an age where I look like a father,” he said. “So yeah, father things, relationships, the nuances of intimacy — love, I guess, whether that’s romantic love or just love for another human being. Exploring those kinds of things gets me out of bed.”