For Once, Cherokee Actor Wes Studi Cast as Romantic Co-star

Actor Wes Studi poses for a portrait in New York on June 14, 2022, to promote his film "A Love Song." (AP)
Actor Wes Studi poses for a portrait in New York on June 14, 2022, to promote his film "A Love Song." (AP)
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For Once, Cherokee Actor Wes Studi Cast as Romantic Co-star

Actor Wes Studi poses for a portrait in New York on June 14, 2022, to promote his film "A Love Song." (AP)
Actor Wes Studi poses for a portrait in New York on June 14, 2022, to promote his film "A Love Song." (AP)

In Wes Studi’s potent and pioneering acting career, he has played vengeful warriors, dying prisoners and impassioned resistance leaders. For three decades, he has arrestingly crafted wide-ranging portraits of the Native American experience. But one thing he had never done in a movie is give someone a kiss.

“I thought it was about time, yeah,” Studi, 74, says chuckling.

In “A Love Song,” a tender indie drama starring another long-pigeonholed character actor, Dale Dickey, Studi is for the first time cast as a romantic co-star. Dickey plays a woman camping by a mountain lake awaiting the visit of an old flame.

Studi, the Cherokee actor who masterfully played the defiant Huron warrior Magua in Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans” and who got his first big break playing the character credited only as “the toughest Pawnee” in “Dances With Wolves,” hasn’t been limited entirely to what he calls “leather and feathers” roles. But it’s sometimes taken some extra effort. When he heard Mann was making “Heat,” Studi called up the director and got himself a part as a police detective.

But recently, Studi is increasingly getting a chance to play a wider array of characters. Along with Max Walker-Silverman’s “A Love Song,” which opens in theaters Friday, he’s a recurring, funny guest star on Sterlin Harjo’s “Reservation Dogs,” the second season of which debuts Aug. 3 on Hulu.

“Hopefully it has to do with creating a better understanding of Native people by the general public,” Studi said in an interview earlier this summer. “It does still exist, the misconception that we were all killed off and we don’t exist anymore as peoples.”

“That’s essentially what I want to work on, and being a godfather to Native people in the industry,” he adds.

With that Studi, sitting outside the lobby of his East Village hotel in New York, lets out such a howl of laughter that he nearly doubles over.

Why does that notion, one many would eagerly endorse, strike him as so hysterical? He entered Hollywood at a time when Indigenous people were regularly played by white actors. (“Sam Waterson is the one that kills me,” Studi says, smiling.) A 2019 honorary Oscar made Studi the first Native American actor ever given an Academy Award.

“I can’t take myself seriously when I say that, that’s why,” he answers, wiping tears from his eyes. “I guess it could be.”

In person, Studi bears little resemblance to his fiercer screen roles. He’s more like his characters in “A Love Song” and “Reservation Dogs.” Amiable. Quick to laugh. Self-deprecating. A good storyteller. He exudes a bemused gratitude for the life he’s found as an actor despite spending half his life without Hollywood ambitions. Studi grew up outside of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and spoke only Cherokee until he was 5. His father was a ranch hand.

“I had never thought of acting, really, except once early in my life when I asked my dad when I saw Jay Silverheels on ‘The Lone Ranger’: ‘Do you think anybody else can do what he does?’” Studi recalls. “He said, ’Probably not. Most of the actors you find are 6-foot tall, blond and blue-eyed.”

At 17, Studi joined the National Guard and volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He served one tour in South Vietnam, and saw heavy action. When he returned home, Studi became an activist and joined the American Indian Movement, taking part in the 1973 occupation of Wooded Knee. It wasn’t until after he got divorced in his late 30s that Studi gave acting a shot -- “on a lark,” he says -- with a Tulsa community theater company his friend was involved with. Studi thought: What do I have to lose?

“The worst thing is that you could embarrass yourself. That’s about it,” he says. “They’re not going to shoot you for it.”

Studi performed wherever the theater company could mount a stage or in gaslight dinner theaters. In one play, he co-starred with Will Sampson and David Carradine. After a few years, Studi headed out to Los Angeles. He was in his early 40s.

“I still get the feeling of: Will I ever work again? That’s always been a part of it,” said Studi. “On the other hand, things have worked out that I have continued to work. I don’t take that lightly. I’m especially grateful that I’ve been able to buy a home and stay in a good car for an extended period of time.”

Studi remembers the Screen Actors Guild book of actors being a hefty tome while the then-newly founded American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts, listing Native actors, was a thin sliver. The parts available to him were also limited.

“The only real opening for a guy who looked like me was in Westerns,” says Studi. “That’s the only real door that was open to us in that point in time. It was simply a matter of being able to deliver lines and look like you mean it.”

After a few roles, Studi landed “Dances With Wolves.” Two years later, Mann cast him as Magua in “The Last of the Mohicans,” the cunning Huron warrior who fervently believes in fighting, ruthlessly, for survival. With time, Studi’s steely, determined performance has only grown more searing.

“Any Native that’s cognizant of history and the back and forth we’ve had with the colonizers, if you will, can have empathy with how he felt about things,” said Studi. “When you’re backed into a corner, you gotta fight. It’s one way or the other. All those things had an emotional consistency to them that I could identify with having been through the turmoil of the ’70s.”

When first-time director Walker-Silverman reached out to Studi, he had little reason to expect the actor of “Geronimo: An American Legend” (1993), “The New World” (2005), “Avatar” (2009) and “Hostiles” (2017), would say yes to a production as small as “A Love Song.”

“We’ve both played a lot of pretty rough people,” she said in January during Sundance. “But he’s such a kind, sweet, gentle soul. It was our first screen kiss. We both laughed a lot about that.”

Studi has goals beyond what he ruefully refers to as his first “rom-com.” One thing he’d like to do is play a main character with a full trajectory, something he feels he’s only done in the Kevin Willmott 2009 film “The Only Good Indian.”

“I’d like to play a lead that takes me from really good to really bad or vice versa, something that has a long arc to it,” says Studi. “I want to continue to do this until I can’t.”

Press Studi and he’ll grant that he sometimes gets letters from young Native American actors who say he inspired them to try. When Studi has been asked to talk to Native children, his message is simple: “If I can do it, you can, too.” And he’s followed along — “a supporter to the max,” he says — as an explosion of young Native talent has emerged in series like “Reservation Dogs” and “Rutherford Falls,” which was co-created by Navajo showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas.

Studi, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Maura Dhu, has also seen one of his three children, son Kholan, pursue acting. Studi visibly brightens remembering when he and Maura mounted a one-man show with the kids helping out. Studi’s son Daniel operated the lighting. His daughter, Leah, was backstage feeding him lines.

“There were times she would get exasperated with me when I dropped something: ‘Dad, that’s not it!’” Studi says laughing. “Oh, it was such fun.”



The ‘Juror #2’ Cast Still Can’t Believe They Got to Work with Clint Eastwood

(L-R) Cedric Yarbrough, Zoey Deutch, Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Leslie Bibb, Gabriel Basso and Francesca Eastwood attend the closing night gala premiere of "Juror #2" during the 2024 AFI Fest at TCL Chinese Theatre on October 27, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
(L-R) Cedric Yarbrough, Zoey Deutch, Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Leslie Bibb, Gabriel Basso and Francesca Eastwood attend the closing night gala premiere of "Juror #2" during the 2024 AFI Fest at TCL Chinese Theatre on October 27, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
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The ‘Juror #2’ Cast Still Can’t Believe They Got to Work with Clint Eastwood

(L-R) Cedric Yarbrough, Zoey Deutch, Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Leslie Bibb, Gabriel Basso and Francesca Eastwood attend the closing night gala premiere of "Juror #2" during the 2024 AFI Fest at TCL Chinese Theatre on October 27, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Getty Images/AFP)
(L-R) Cedric Yarbrough, Zoey Deutch, Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Leslie Bibb, Gabriel Basso and Francesca Eastwood attend the closing night gala premiere of "Juror #2" during the 2024 AFI Fest at TCL Chinese Theatre on October 27, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Getty Images/AFP)

Nicholas Hoult was certain someone had made a mistake.

Clint Eastwood wanted to talk to him about starring in his new film, a slow burn legal thriller about a normal guy faced with an extraordinary moral dilemma. Surely Eastwood meant someone else, he thought. But soon enough they were chatting on the phone about "Juror #2," opening in theaters Friday.

"I was so nervous," the British actor said. "I remember saying to him, ‘I really like the script.’ I was so eager to please."

For Eastwood’s comeback, Hoult slipped into a pitch-perfect impersonation of his gravelly voice: "If you like it so much, I guess I’ll have to read it."

Suddenly Hoult was laughing. The tension was broken.

"I was like, wow this guy’s cool," he said. "He’s got a great sense of humor and we’re going to get along."

Though there may be a healthy amount of English self-deprecation in the story, the spirit of it isn’t unique to Hoult. Eastwood, 94, is the kind of living legend that has even the most seasoned veterans a little starstruck. "Juror #2," his 42nd film behind the camera, is getting strong reviews for being a smart, original courtroom thriller about an impossible conundrum.

In the original script by Jonathan Abrams, Hoult’s character, a recovering alcoholic with his first child about to be born, gets selected for jury duty on a murder case. But when the facts start to emerge, so do his memories and he’s forced to confront the possibility that he might have been unknowingly responsible.

"After the first read it had me," Eastwood wrote in an email. "It made me think about what would you do if you were put in this situation? What is right? What is wrong? Who would you protect? A true moral dilemma. That’s something I’d want to watch."

And he started rounding out his cast, led by Hoult who he called a true "movie star," with supporting turns from Toni Collette as the ambitious prosecutor, Chris Messina as the public defender, J.K. Simmons as a fellow juror, as well as Zoey Deutch and Kiefer Sutherland, who wrote a letter asking if there might be a role for him.

Sutherland had long imagined he’d cross paths with Eastwood. A lifelong Western fan, Sutherland’s late father Donald Sutherland had even worked with Eastwood a few times ("Kelly’s Heroes,Space Cowboys"). But when he read about the plans for "Juror #2" he felt a new sense of urgency.

"I always thought one day I would arrive at Mr. Eastwood’s doorstep. Then I realized that that time was maybe kind of going away," said Sutherland. "I just said, ‘I’ve always dreamed of working with you and if there is a part, any part, I would just like to be able to have the experience of watching you direct."

He was ultimately cast to play a lawyer and an AA sponsor to Hoult’s character. The screentime was relatively small, but the experience was exactly what he hoped: A masterclass in the truest sense.

"I’ve worked with people that shout and get angry and they’re very demonstrative," Sutherland said. "He was so amazingly quiet and calm and soft spoken. That’s someone who has power, when they can be that and get everything they need."

On one of his first days, an assistant director was explaining to Sutherland how to navigate a doorway in a scene. Eastwood stepped in to stop the tutorial, telling the AD, "He knows what he’s doing." Despite his 40-plus years in the business, Sutherland said he walked a little taller that day.

"It made my life," Sutherland said. "I’m very glad I didn’t work with him when I was 18 years old, because I would have tied myself in knots."

Collette similarly said she’s never felt so trusted.

"He’s so confident as a director, but not in a negative way. He’s just so present and allows it all to unfold," she said. "I’ve never worked with anyone who’s so easygoing, to be honest."

The film would also be the first time she and Hoult would share the screen since they played mother and son in "About a Boy" 23 years ago, when he was only 11. They’d texted a bit prior, but Collette was not prepared for the swell of emotion seeing Hoult, now 34, again. Then came their first scene together and it wasn’t going to be an easy one: In fact, it’s the last shot of the film.

But that’s the Eastwood way. His efficiency on set is the stuff of legend. Sometimes you get two takes, but three is almost unheard of. Hoult said he and the actors on the jury even rehearsed in secret to make sure they would nail the lengthier scenes. No one wanted to be the squeaky wheel.

"He’s not efficient for the sake of being efficient," Sutherland said. "I think Sydney Pollack, for instance, was really efficient and kind of when he became known for being efficient, started trying to show off his efficiency. ... I think Mr. Eastwood just kind of looks at a set and looks at a scene and just finds the straightest way to shoot it."

Much has been made about whether "Juror #2" is going to be Eastwood’s last film. But he’s not saying that, publicly or privately. In fact, when production went on hiatus during the actors strike, he didn’t even use that time as a break.

"I remember when we did come back from the strike, I was like, ’What did you do? And he was like, ‘Well, I was looking for new material,’" Collette said. "It’s nobody’s position to say this is his last movie."

Sutherland added: "His parking spot at the Warner Bros. lot isn’t going anywhere."