So his team called casting director Rene Haynes, who’s spent the last three decades finding Native American talent for film and television projects. For “Killers of the Flower Moon,” she worked with Scorsese’s longtime casting director Ellen Lewis to find actors to play the plethora of Native parts.
“This is something special,” Haynes said. “The fanfare that this project is getting, the level of A-list talent. I think that we are in a renaissance of indigenous projects and we are all very hopeful.”
There has been a recent boom in high-profile projects centering Native American actors. The FX television show “Reservation Dogs” on Hulu recently finished an acclaimed three-season run telling the stories of a group of Oklahoma teens. On AMC there’s “Dark Winds,” a show about Navajo police officers in the 1970s. The 2022 movie “Prey,” an outgrowth of the “Predator” franchise, featured Comanche protagonists. Many of these projects have been hailed for their commitment to telling indigenous stories—and for using indigenous performers, too.
Behind the scenes, there is a cottage industry of specialists in the casting business like Haynes who focus on finding Native American talent.
“I feel like when I first started it was pretty much just period pieces-slash-westerns, and most of the time, Native American characters were antagonists,” said Angelique Midthunder, the casting director behind “Reservation Dogs” as well as “Rez Ball,” a coming film about a Navajo high school basketball team produced by LeBron James. She started her company Midthunder Casting in 2005. “It was rare that you saw a fully fleshed-out character that was Native American.”
Midthunder, who was adopted from Thailand, came to her work through a piece of casting that she would avoid at all costs now: As an actress, she was cast in a Native American role in the 1995 film “East Meets West,” a Japanese film set in the American West. Midthunder met her husband, David Midthunder, who is Lakota and Nakoda, on the project.
“That also was a blessing and curse,” Midthunder said. “It opened my eyes to an issue that I knew nothing about, and then I joke that my whole career has been in retribution.”
Now Midthunder’s daughter, Amber, is also an actor. Haynes cast Amber in the lead role in “Prey.”
Haynes entered the casting business about 35 years ago when a casting director for the 1988 film “War Party”—which was shooting on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Mont.—found Haynes’s name on a list from the local film commission because of her work with a local theater company. Soon, Haynes was casting extras for both that project and eventually “Dances With Wolves,” which came out two years later.
Less than a quarter of 1% of speaking roles in top-grossing films from 2007 to 2022 went to Native American actors, according to a recent study from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
Haynes said she had never worked with the Osage Nation before “Killers,” but she was familiar with the incidents depicted in the film, based on the nonfiction book by David Grann. As soon as she heard that Scorsese had obtained the rights to the book, she was eager to be on board.
The movie tells the story of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) who marries an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), while helping his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro) commit a series of systematic killings that will rob the Osage, who had come into oil fortunes at the time, of their wealth.
In November 2019, the production did a massive open casting call throughout Oklahoma where Haynes and Lewis saw thousands of auditions looking for both speaking roles and extras. “We hadn’t engaged anyone until after we saw the Osage, because no one likes to find a diamond-in-the-rough new talent more than me,” Haynes said.
Haynes cast 39 people from the search. But the role of Mollie went to Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce descent, not Osage, and was known via her work in the 2016 drama “Certain Women,” which won her multiple critics’ awards.
“First you start with the tribe, then you start with the community, then you start with people adjacent to that community,” said Haynes. “Then as long as that actor is indigenous and in good standing in their community I don’t think we would have any problems.”
In addition to Gladstone, Haynes also helped recruit actors whom she’s been watching for nearly their entire lives. Haynes gave her business card to the mother of Jillian Dion, who plays one of Mollie’s sisters, when Dion was around 8 years old. She said she has known JaNae Collins, who portrays another one of the sisters, since she was a teenager through Collins’s father, the stuntman Rod Rondeaux.
Both Gladstone and Collins have been featured on the recently concluded “Reservation Dogs” for FX on Hulu, which Midthunder cast.
Among the complications in casting ethnically specific roles are discrimination regulations that prohibit asking people about their ethnic makeup, Midthunder said. But her expertise allows her to come up with questions that can help her determine authenticity.
“I know what tribes are enrolled at what reservation,”she said. “Somebody says to me that they are from Pine Ridge, I know they’re Oglala. I’ve been to Pine Ridge whether it’s for personal reasons, visiting friends or whether it’s been for casting calls.”
In addition to doing open calls, Midthunder also finds actors through her social-media channels. That came in handy for “Rez Ball,” which required her to vet about 5,000 submissions from the indigenous basketball community.
Sydney Freeland, the Navajo director behind “Rez Ball,” has worked with Midthunder since her first movie, 2014’s “Drunktown’s Finest,” following life on a Navajo reservation.
“She has an understanding about these Pan-Indian aspects, where she knows more than I do,” Freeland said. “She knows where to look and she knows who to ask, but more importantly she knows there are certain things you want to be respectful of.”
Both Midthunder and Haynes said they have turned down projects that they didn’t feel were respectful. Haynes showed producers potential actors for a role in the early 2010s, when she was told an A-list actor who “isn’t remotely indigenous” was going to play the part before any indigenous actors had auditioned. She pulled out.
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