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Miles Morrisseau
ICT
When Kali Reis leans in on acting legend Jodie Foster in their first scene together in season four of HBO’s critically acclaimed series, “True Detective: Night Country,” you can feel her. She is a presence. She has weight. Then she drops one of the most quotable lines in Indigenous pop culture history, “My spirit animal eats old (expletive) White ladies like you for breakfast.”
Reis, Wampanoag/Cape Verdean, went from middleweight boxing champ to trading verbal blows with a Hollywood heavyweight. She says acting with Foster was like fighting Mike Tyson in his prime. “It was like. oh, wow, I got a lot to prove here. You know what I mean? I gotta bring it. I gotta bring the goods, whatever goods those are that I have this very early on in my career, but it was such a blessing,” Reis told ICT. “I got to see her work in her element, how she operates, what she sees, what she envisions, and it was like being with Mike Tyson in 1986 training for the heavyweight championship, it was that good to be able to learn from her.”
It is difficult to name anyone who has made the transition from professional athlete to dramatic actor so seamlessly as Reis, 37. The only other athletes who have crossed over have been in action or comedic roles and only wrestlers like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena and others, and weightlifters like Arnold Schwarzenegger and numerous nameless background actors. In sports that are in the Olympics, it is difficult to think of anyone in modern film that has made that transition.
Her journey from boxing champion to co-star in a prestige HBO drama sparring with a two-time Oscar winner is remarkable in its speed. This is only her third acting role.
Her first role was in 2021 as the lead in “Catch the Fair One” in which her character is a former boxer and current addict trying to rescue her younger sister from a human trafficking ring. The gritty drama was based on a story Reis developed with the director, Josef Kubota Wladyka. The film earned Reis a nomination for best actress in the 2022 Independent Spirit Awards.
She had a small part in the film “Black Flies” with Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan in 2023 and is now carrying the weight of a critically acclaimed series. Reis credits the skills learned in the ring have given her the tools to succeed on the screen.
“I feel like I’ve been training my entire boxing career to get into this industry,” Reis said, noting the similarities between the two crafts. “The ability to trust people to see what I don’t see. In the boxing world I have my corner, my coaches to see the things that I don’t see instead to give me instructions… Just like in film as being an actor, you have a director telling you what they need from you, they see what you don’t see on the camera.”
Reis says both professions require some fancy footwork. “The ability to stay really present in the moment and have the ability to think on your toes, so to speak, figuratively in front of the camera, and then literally in the ring, the ability to have a lot of tools to get the job done. If this tool doesn’t work, we try this tool, if that tool doesn’t work, and we try this tool.”
As a boxer Reis used her platform to shine a light on the national and international crisis of murdered and missing women. She continues to advocate in her new role. “That was really important for me to be able to be part of telling that story highlighting that because it’s a very real experience for a lot of Indigenous families,” Reis explains. “To be a voice for the voiceless and to speak about it to people and have that message so more people can know about it so we can put a stop to it.”
The storyline in Night Country is filled with references to the crisis of MMIP including the unsolved mystery of Inupiat activist Annie K, a crime that Navarro sees connected to the death of climate scientists that begin the mystery. Each “True Detective” season has its own self-contained story meaning viewers aren’t required to watch seasons in order.
The new season was shot in Reykjavik, Iceland, which represents the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska. The real-time cold, darkness and isolation provide a unique visual and atmospheric palette that allows writer/director/showrunner Issa Lopez to create Night Country’s own space in the True Detective universe. Lopez is a Mexican filmmaker and writer who started out making romantic comedies but made her mark when she directed her film “Tigers Are Not Afraid” in 2017, which won numerous film festival awards and the award for best director at Screamfest. Lopez writes and directs all six episodes of Night Country.
The fourth season in the critically acclaimed series sets itself apart with the reality of a world without sunrise and the female gaze with nods to the first season and other classics of the genre. The story begins in a research facility reminiscent of the bottom of the world, end of days sci-fi horror classic, “The Thing.” The series also has a clash of cultures between the leads Foster’s Danvers and Reis’ Navarro that harks back to the Sidney Poitier classic, “In the Heat of the Night.” The racist remarks by Danvers are never allowed to go unchallenged if not spiked into the frozen ground.
The series premiered on Jan. 14 and scored an impressive 93 percent approval on Rotten Tomatoes amongst critics and a score in the 60s among audience suggests it may have been a victim of the current male maligned online trolls who feel all stories need to be male driven.
There are perspectives that suggest women can’t realistically do the job they are portraying on screen. Anyone who has lived in the North or on First Nations knows that women do all jobs, including policing. (Note: The majority of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers serving our community are female and there have been times when it was all female. On my wife’s First Nation there is an Anishinaabek police services officer who could be Navarro’s sister.)
Reis appreciates having an opportunity to portray another shade in the Indigenous reality. “Every family, every clan, every tribe, and band has in every different region of Indigenous people all over the world, not even just Turtle Island, Canada, South America it is all different from family to family, from tribe to tribe,” Reis says. “To be able to be part of that and represent in my own personal journey. Northeast woodland Wampanoag first contact tribes mixed. That’s what we look like. Sorry. We don’t look like people who are from the Midwest.”
Although filmed in Iceland the series tried to maintain a level of cultural integrity to the Alaskan setting and to the Indigenous people casting Inupiat actors and having local artisans create costumes and other production design elements. In addition to the memorable Billie Eillesh track that plays over the credits, much of the eerie sound elements come from Tanya Tagaq, the award winning Inuk musician.
“To be able to dive into the Inupiaq Alaska Native part that we don’t even as Native Americans don’t get to experience a lot because it’s so remote,” Reis says. “They are so they are built for Ford tough men. And you people, Arctic natives are built different. Y’all are built different. God bless and love you to death. So it was just amazing to be able to sit down and say, Hey, how do you want to see yourself on screen and then up? Tell me stories.”
Following the production Reis and Foster have maintained an off-screen friendship travelling back up to Alaska to meet again with the other actors and collaborators that created this uniquely northern nightmare.
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