Zahn McClarnon’s Epic, Groundbreaking Hollywood Story

Welcome to Always Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Zahn McClarnon revisits his life across dozens of TV shows—leading to two of his biggest showcases yet, in Dark Winds and Reservation Dogs.

If three makes a trend, then how lucky are we to live in the time of the Zahn McClarnon Episode. The Denver-born actor has been a mainstay on the small screen ever since he moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s, but only recently did prestige TV seem to figure out just how good he was. 

We can give some credit to Noah Hawley, who cast him for Fargo’s second season in an initially small role that turned pivotal at the story’s bloody climax. A few years later, McClarnon started recurring on Westworld before pulling off career-best work in his stunning season two showcase, “Kiksuya,” bringing knowledge of his Lakota heritage to the rich portrait of his mysterious character, Akecheta. This TV season then completed the trifecta in Reservation Dogs’ surrealist spectacular “This Is Where the Plot Thickens,” in which McClarnon’s Lighthorseman Big goes on a hell of a psychedelic trip. 

“I’ve been on cloud nine for the last decade,” McClarnon tells me over Zoom, that iconic, evocative face of the small screen sneaking in a grin.

And that aforementioned trio doesn’t even take into account the biggest career leap McClarnon has taken of late: His first lead role, in AMC’s Dark Winds. The psychological thriller smartly embraces conventions of the cop drama while forging its own path in its focus on two Navajo police officers (McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon) investigating a murder in the ’70s Southwest. Putting a fresh spin on classic genre fare, the show is a great metaphor for how a perennial, oft underused scene-stealer has enhanced popular shows for decades. With pretty much every gripping hour of Dark Winds operating as its own kind of Zahn McClarnon Episode, it’s also the ultimate example of what happens when a Hollywood journeyman finally gets his due.

When McClarnon moved to Los Angeles, more than 30 years ago, he synced up with the American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts—a collective of Native American actors from tribes all over the country who’d meet up at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, go out on the same auditions, and lift each other up through disappointments and breakthroughs. McClarnon arrived with nearly nothing in his pockets; the roles for people who looked like him were limited, and of what was available, even less unique. “But immediately, because there’s such a small pool of Native talent, it wasn’t like I was going up against 150 people at an audition,” he says. “It was more like a half a dozen or a dozen depending on the age range…it wasn’t as tough as I think most people had [it]. I wasn’t going up against the Tom Cruises.”

For better and for worse, McClarnon filled a Hollywood niche. “I got typecast right away,” he says. “It was usually the bad kid or the gangbanger.” But he found some unusual opportunity within that. In 1992, he won a lead role in the Baywatch episode “Showdown at Malibu Beach High,” playing an activist student at the school where Pamela Anderson’s C.J. has just accepted a position, and which is planning to sell off sacred land. He says it was actually a backdoor pilot meant to spin off into a Malibu High series vehicle for Anderson, who’d joined Baywatch that season, but didn’t move forward. 

The episode still marked a turning point. A few years later, McClarnon booked a recurring role on the Old West–set Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman as Walks on Cloud, the son of Cloud Dancing (Larry Sellers). “It was stereotypical Native stuff, but that’s all that we really had back then,” McClarnon says. “Unfortunately at that time, as a guest-star actor, you weren’t allowed to really voice your opinion on these things.” Still, he found a surprising mentor in Dr. Quinn star Jane Seymour. “She pulled me into her trailer once, sat me down, and talked to me about the business a little bit,” McClarnon says. “It inspired me so much that an actress of that stature, a number one on a TV show, would do that—pull me aside and talk to me about the pitfalls.” They recently saw each other for the first time in 30 years. “I thanked her for helping me jump-start my career,” he says.