How Reservation Dogs Became the Best-Cast Show on TV
Angelique Midthunder cast the final season’s guest roles with a mix of actors — some veterans; some untested; some with Hollywood experience; some local to Oklahoma, where the series was shot — to help Reservation Dogs paint a genuine, idiosyncratic portrait of midwestern Native life.When Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs) first spies on her estranged father in the penultimate episode of Reservation Dogs, she’s surprised to see he makes regular stops at the weed dispensary and enjoys a morning joint while driving. “My dad’s a big stoner,” she texts the Rez Dogs group chat, somewhat disappointed. In these moments, the audience is also struck by another very important detail: Her deadbeatish dad is played by Ethan Hawke.
Hawke had been on the potential guest-star radar of showrunner and series co-creator Sterlin Harjo for a while. “Ethan is a friend. We work together on other projects,” Harjo explained in an email. (The two are collaborating on a TV adaptation of Indeh, the 2016 graphic novel about the Apache Wars Hawke co-wrote with illustrator Greg Ruth.) “He told me he wanted to be in Rez Dogs.”
Hawke was hardly the only actor clamoring to snag a role on the critically lauded, Peabody Award–winning dramedy. During its three-season run, which concludes September 27, Reservations Dogs has been a magnet for aspiring and esteemed Native talent eager to join the rare television team composed almost entirely of Indigenous people. And non-Indigenous actors have been equally eager to make an appearance. “After the first season, I had agents, big agents, reaching out to me saying, Hey, if you ever have a spot, my client …” says Angelique Midthunder, the series’ casting director. “These were people who, in season one, we would’ve been dying to get on the show.”
Across 30 episodes, Midthunder filled an array of guest roles with a mix of actors — some veterans; some untested; some with Hollywood experience; some local to Oklahoma, where the series was shot — who helped Reservation Dogs paint a genuine, idiosyncratic portrait of midwestern Native life. Maintaining that authenticity was paramount for Midthunder, especially when it came to casting well-known, non-Indigenous actors. “Sometimes when you bring in somebody recognizable, you wonder if they’re going to stand out and not blend into the world, especially when the world is rural Oklahoma,” Midthunder says. But Hawke “fit right in.”
“I never had anyone else in mind,” Harjo says of casting Ethan Hawke as Elora’s father, Rick.Though Harjo had been thinking about casting Hawke in an episode, Midthunder followed her usual process, making a list of candidates when it came time to fill the role of Rick, Elora’s absent father. Hawke was at the top of Midthunder’s list — she won’t disclose who else was on it — and Harjo immediately agreed he was the right guy for the part. “I never had anyone else in mind,” he says.
Before Harjo sent Hawke the script for “Elora’s Dad,” which was written by Jacobs, the showrunner did “an Ethan pass” on it that was “inspired by a lot of the Before Sunset series,” directed by Richard Linklater. That influence is strong in the episode, particularly during a seemingly extemporaneous conversation between Elora and Rick as they walk to a bus stop, a scene with the same organic, chatty energy as the strolls Hawke and Julie Delpy take in the trilogy. “A lot of Rez Dogs is inspired by Linklater’s work,” Harjo notes. So is the name of Elora’s father. “It felt fitting,” he says, “to name Ethan’s character after Rick.”
Once Hawke got the offer and the script, he said yes. “Honestly, it was the easiest deal I’ve ever done on the show,” Midthunder says.
Midthunder looked for “actors who could believably slip into the skin of that character” while casting season three’s fifth episode, “House Made of Bongs.”An earlier episode this season, “House Made of Bongs,” is an even more blatant riff on another Linklater movie, Dazed and Confused, and presented a more daunting casting challenge for Midthunder, who had to find a group of actors to play the teen versions of the res elders in a flashback to the 1970s. “This was a big ask for the young actors that auditioned for those roles,” she says, noting they had to be convincing not just as teens but as counterparts for well-established characters — Elora’s wise grandmother Mabel; the offbeat and artistic Bucky; Cheese’s socially conscious foster grandmother Irene; Elora’s pot-smoking uncle Brownie; future medicine man Fixico; and Fixico’s cousin, the sensitive Maximus — played as adults by Indigenous stars Geraldine Keams, Wes Studi, Casey Camp-Horinek, Gary Farmer, Richard Ray Whitman, and Graham Greene, respectively.
“It was important that they embodied everything they could about the characters,” Midthunder says. “As much of a physical resemblance as we could find, and actors who could believably slip into the skin of that character.”
Quannah Chasinghorse, a well-known climate activist and model who has appeared on the covers of Elle, Vogue Mexico, and Vogue Japan, stood out as the perfect Irene in part because she looked so much like Camp-Horinek. “Tall, the long hair, the strong features — it’s such a great match,” Midthunder says. Chasinghorse had auditioned for Reservation Dogs numerous times over the three seasons before landing this part, an experience shared by several of the young guest stars who wound up in “House Made of Bongs.” Shelby Factor, the sister of Cheese actor Lane Factor, had been trying out since the pilot and finally got cast as young Mabel. “She came in and initially auditioned for Elora, just like everybody else,” Midthunder recalls, noting that many of the female actors who eventually got cast in other roles, including Elva Guerra, who plays Jackie, initially tried out for the part that went to Jacobs.
It was not uncommon for Midthunder to see the same actors over and over during the course of a series, especially on a show dominated by younger actors from a very specific demographic. “We’re talking about 2 percent of the population when we’re looking at the Indigenous population,” she says. “It’s such a small pool to draw from.”
Midthunder needed to find someone who resembled Devery Jacobs to plays Elora’s late mom, Cookie, locking in JaNae Collins (right) to play opposite Sarah Podemski’s Rita.Nathan Alexis, who becomes a young Brownie and is the brother of Paulina Alexis, who plays Willie Jack, also auditioned multiple times before landing that role. Like Farmer, he carries himself with casual stoner authority and lets his vowels slowly drip off his tongue. Mato Standing Soldier, the composer of Reservation Dogs’ score, was tapped to play the young Bucky after multiple previous auditions; though he doesn’t resemble Studi physically, the young actor projects the same sense that Bucky’s mind is always on at least two things at once. And JaNae Collins, who portrays Elora’s late, fun-loving mom Cookie in subsequent episode “Wahoo!”, also submitted herself for other roles during the run of the show. In addition to bringing her talent, Collins looks a lot like Jacobs, a crucial factor since Elora is constantly told how much she resembles her mother.
While Midthunder conducts broad searches for many of her roles, she also tapped local talent in Oklahoma. That’s where she found Josiah Wesley Jones, who slipped into the shoes of a young Fixico in “House Made of Bongs,” as well as Lane Factor, who marks Rez Dogs as his first acting job. “If it would’ve been up to Sterlin, we would’ve found everyone in Oklahoma,” Midthunder says. “He’s so dedicated to making it authentic.” Early in the show’s run, Midthunder even found guest actors on social media. “People just started following me on Instagram and saying, ‘We want to be on the show,’” she says. “We definitely cast a few roles off that during the first season.”
“It was about finding the right, interesting role for him,” Harjo says of casting Oscar nominee Graham Greene.It’s a testament to how far the series has come from those initial Insta days that, in its final season, Midthunder had no trouble booking Greene, an Indigenous Canadian, Academy Award–nominated actor who is a legendary figure in the Indigenous acting community. He joined the recurring cast in the role of the older Maximus, a complex recluse with mental-health issues and a firm belief in the existence of aliens, or, as he calls them, star people. “I have to imagine that he may have wondered what took so long,” Midthunder laughs about taking three seasons to cast Greene. “He wanted to be a part of the show from the moment I reached out to his rep.”
“Really it was about finding the right, interesting role for him,” Harjo adds. “We found it with Maximus.”
With the experience of casting Reservation Dogs behind her, Midthunder is most proud of the diversity of the actors who made it on the show. “Finding this combination of local people from Oklahoma, newcomers who haven’t had experience before but feel very grounded in the material, and then bringing in people who are a bit more iconic — that’s where the magic happens.”
She saw it for herself when she watched the final episodes. “I was watching episode eight yesterday, and there’s the scene where they pan across everybody visiting Fixico in the hospital,” she recalls. “My heart was swelling with joy because I was like, Look at those beautiful faces, all those great faces.”
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