The second season of crime drama “Dark Winds” can 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 feel 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 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 up to the set [in Santa Fe, NM]. We also had quite just a few dinners together,” McClarnon said. “Bob [Redford] got up to 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 lately.”
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 top of Season 1, it was revealed that Chee was an undercover FBI agent; Season 2 begins with Chee now working as a non-public 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 discover.
“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 often 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 terrific cultural advisor from the Navajo nation. I grew up throughout 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 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 feel we [Native Americans] have a great distance to go,” he said. “I would really like 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 might be all Native, casts which might be all native,” he said. “We’re finally able to tell our own stories.”
This interview was done prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.