Give Zahn McClarnon an Emmy Already

Photo: Michael Moriatis/AMC

Zahn McClarnon should have — conservative estimate — a half-dozen Emmy nominations by now. There was his coolly intimidating turn as ascendant crime lord Hanzee Dent in the second season of Fargo, and his standout performance as the increasingly sentient host Akecheta in Westworld’s “Kiksuya.” The wacky humor he brought to superstitious lighthorseman Officer Big, a key part of Reservation Dogs’s perennially overlooked ensemble for four seasons, was a tonal 180 from the sarcastic and snide tribal police chief he played years before on the western series Longmire. None of those roles earned him a single nomination, but all of them have led to his starring turn on AMC’s Dark Winds, the third season of which is perfectly calibrated to bring McClarnon the recognition he’s long deserved. 

Communicating resentment, regret, and a sense of humor as dry as the southwestern Diné landscape, McClarnon anchors Graham Roland’s neo-noir adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s “Leaphorn and Chee” novels as Navajo Tribal Police leader Joe Leaphorn, a man trying to hold the reservation steady against the tide of outsider infringement. McClarnon has played a number of cops, but his ability to subvert our assumptions about law-enforcement characters through tone and physicality means none of them can be reduced to cliché. With his customary mixture of paternal dignity, razor-sharp pique, and casual aloofness, McClarnon can go in one sequence from tracing a blood trail, to ribbing co-workers about their lack of survival skills, to staring in shock and despair at an unexpected corpse that upends Leaphorn’s Indigenous beliefs. Dark Winds has already established Leaphorn as a man whose life experience has set him on a particular path of morality, and in the series’ third season (it’s already been renewed for a fourth), he pushes that performance into punishing and vulnerable self-reflection.

In the first season, Leaphorn and his nurse wife, Emma (Deanna Allison), are grieving their son Joe Jr., who died in an explosion at a reservation drilling site; in the second season, Leaphorn learns businessman B.J. Vines (John Diehl) engineered the accident to buy the property for cheap. When Vines’s extensive business and political connections lead to the charges against him being dropped, Leaphorn, inspired by a speech from his also-cop father Henry (Joseph Runningfox) about the difference between “white justice” and “Indian justice,” drives Vines out to a snowy, remote corner of land near the reservation and leaves him there. It’s a certain death, and when Dark Winds’s third season picks up six months later, Vines is still missing, and Leaphorn seems simultaneously relieved and more agonized by the retribution that weighs on his soul. McClarnon’s magnetism has always made it difficult to look away whenever he’s onscreen, but in these eight episodes, he reveals fissures in that presence, imbuing Leaphorn with an uncertainty that makes the character feel more mortal and elevates Dark Winds’ strongest season to date.

As Leaphorn worries about the FBI sending Special Agent Sylvia Washington (Jenna Elfman) to the reservation to look into what happened to Vines (remember, the FBI has jurisdiction over major crimes on Indigenous land, a relationship that’s been contentious for decades), he also has to track down a pair of missing teens. Where could 14-year-olds Ernesto Cata and George Bowlegs have gone, and does their disappearance have anything to do with the archaeological site they were working at? Should Leaphorn and his partner, Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), prepare for a worst-case outcome? Or are the boys victims of the Ye’iitsoh, a folklore monster that continues Dark Winds’s incorporation of mystical elements? As Leaphorn begins to believe in a supernatural villain, he’s beset by unnerving visions that cause him to question if his job makes it impossible for him to uphold Indigenous customs. Eight hours away, near Mexico, Leaphorn’s former protégé Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten) is trying to carve out a new career with U.S. Border Control. Her investigation into an Indigenous Mixtec mother and daughter being forcibly brought into the U.S. leads her to oil baron Tom Spenser (Bruce Greenwood, only slightly toning down the charming evil of his The Fall of the House of Usher performance), who might be somehow connected to Leaphorn and Chee’s case — and who might put Manuelito in danger her former co-workers can’t get her out of.

The sense that one misguided, selfish, or just flat-out reckless decision is enough to set you on a path of no return feels essential to this season of Dark Winds, which expands its cast to serve that idea. Gordon and Matten get new counterparts to complicate their characters’ internal grappling. American Primeval scene-stealer Derek Hinkey plays Shorty Bowlegs, father of the missing George and Chee’s childhood bully, while Alex Meraz plays Border Patrol agent Ivan Muños, who asks Manuelito for a slow dance to Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Night Time Is the Right Time” and warns her to watch her back. (Other excellent needle drops this season: David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”) The series’ devotion to writing Native American characters of different backgrounds and ideologies is one of its greatest consistencies and something McClarnon has talked about being key to Dark Winds’s production. Its willingness to explore contrasting viewpoints about how Indigenous communities should interact with larger American structures gives it a certain “What is our praxis?” quality, but that narrative and intellectual sprawl needs something to center it all, and no one is doing it like McClarnon. With each episode, he scrunches his posture a little lower, squints a little more at the uncanny infringing upon his reality, and fractures his character’s lawfulness a little further.

As the third season reaches its introspective crescendo, it becomes clear that Leaphorn’s internal battle between right and wrong isn’t just a story here, it’s the story, and one that only McClarnon could shoulder. In his scenes with Allison, McClarnon angles Leaphorn away from his wife, shifting his body so that they’re conspicuously unaligned in perspective and place; his chemistry with A Martinez, who plays Leaphorn’s peer Chief Gordo Sena, is built on a shared sense of world-weariness and lots of ruminative gazes into the middle distance. And yet all of that nuance is nothing compared to the extreme interiority McClarnon brings to sixth episode “Ábidoo’niidęę (What He Had Been Told),” a form-breaking, Lynchian installment that unearths an aspect of Leaphorn’s past and makes explicit the series’ long-gestating considerations of what it means to act against whiteness, Catholicism, and other systems of oppression that have long attempted to erase Indigenous people. Director Erica Tremblay’s allegorical episode puts McClarnon in the position of killing a part of Leaphorn as an act of renewal, and the actor plays it like a cresting wave, building on the character’s established stillness until the weight of his realizations crashes down like so much cleansing water. It’s unforgettable work in what’s shaping up to be a career-highlight season for McClarnon, and it’s long past time for the Emmys to finally start paying attention.