The second season of crime drama “Dark Winds” shall be slighter lighter in tone, series star Zahn McClarnon said.
“There’s a bit more levity between [my character, Joe Leaphorn] and Jim Chee [which] I believe is fun to explore, their father/son form of relationship, the teasing,” McClarnon, 56, told The Post.
Premiering July 27 on AMC+ (and July 30 at 9 p.m. on AMC), the series, set on a Navajo reservation within the Nineteen Seventies, is executive-produced by “Game of Thrones” creator George R.R. Martin and Robert Redford.
“I saw George quite a bit. He’d come as much as the set [in Santa Fe, NM]. We also had quite just a few dinners together,” McClarnon said. “Bob [Redford] got as much as the set just a few times and said hello to everybody. I spoke to him on the phone just a few times, and we had a pair dinners. But he’s getting up there in age [at 86]. It’s form of hard for him to get around nowadays.”
The inaugural season of “Dark Winds,” based on a series of novels called “Leaphorn & Chee,” the drew 2.2 million viewers — a record for AMC+.
The series follows Navajo tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn (McClarnon) and Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon, “Twilight”) as they investigate crimes on their reservation — including grisly murder. The story also includes serious topics including the forced sterilization of Indigenous women. At the tip of Season 1, it was revealed that Chee was an undercover FBI agent; Season 2 begins with Chee now working as a personal investigator, while Leaphorn is working on a case involving a sociopath (Nicholas Logan). However the two men cross paths again before too long.
“Does Jim Chee replace Joe’s [deceased] son? Is that why Joe likes Jim a lot? We don’t know.,” McClarnon said. “We’ll have to search out out.
“But Kiowa Gordon, who plays Chee, is such a lighthearted guy,” he said. “He brings positive energy to the set. I walk around as Joe Leaphorn and I’m normally pretty into myself and quiet. It’s exciting when Kiowa comes on set. He makes everybody laugh. It makes it easier for me to work, that’s of course.”
Although his “Dark Winds” character is Navajo, McClarnon himself is Lakota.
“We had a fantastic cultural advisor from the Navajo nation. I grew up inside the Native communities. Obviously there are different tribes, and different cultures inside those tribes,” he said. “But there are universals — humor inside our community, the matriarchal society. So my whole life was form of a road map, and a study of Native community.”
McClarnon is one of the vital prolific Native actors. He’s starred in “Fargo,” “Westworld,” “Longmir,” and the FX comedy “Reservation Dogs.”
“There was quite a little bit of change [in the industry], but I believe we [Native Americans] have an extended technique to go,” he said. “I would love to see more Native Americans inside more of the studios, more of the producers, and so forth. But we’ve got just a few [and] things are moving along.
“We’re finally writing our own stuff, and have crews which can be all Native, casts which can be all native,” he said. “We’re finally capable of tell our own stories.”
This interview was done prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.
