D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai Wants Natives to Get Paid (2024)

“I’m from an amazing community, and I’m just proud to be a part of it,” Bear Smallhill declares in the Reservation Dogs series finale. D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, the actor who played Bear, knows this too. As the rising Oji-Cree First Nations and Guyanese actor reaches new heights, he wants to bring other Indigenous actors up with him. “I tell Native kids all the time, ‘If you’re interested in acting, try it out,’” he says. “If you do well in this industry, you can gain a whole new life, like I have.”

It is a new life for the 22-year-old, who was born and raised in Toronto and thought he’d never leave. He now resides in California, where he’s lived since getting cast in Reservation Dogs, which premiered in 2021. The FX series was groundbreaking—every writer, director, and series regular was Indigenous—and it’s also stellar television, touching on grief, spirituality, colonization, friendship, and tradition. Co-created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, the critically acclaimed show followed the daily life of a group of Native teens living just outside a reservation in Okern, Oklahoma, who are coming to terms with their friend’s death.

The show aired its final season last year, and Woon-A-Tai is “definitely missing it,” but he understands “a story has to end.” In this fickle TV landscape, it’s a blessing its creators could end the show on their own terms, rather than get canceled. “Reservation Dogs was the first show of its kind regarding Indigenous representation, Indigenous comedy,” Woon-A-Tai says. “It was very important that we left on our own foot rather than someone telling us how to do it.”

The Reservation Dogs cast and crew remain close; Woon-A-Tai’s costar Paulina Alexis recently took him snowboarding for the first time. “The Indigenous acting pool is very small in North America, so we all know each other,” he says. “We’re bound to see each other in the future, so it wasn’t a true goodbye.”

In a 2023 report, Stacy L. Smith, founder and director of USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, called out “the patterns of erasure and invisibility that are often the norm” for the Native community. And despite Lily Gladstone’s historic Oscar nomination for Killers of the Flower Moon, she’s an anomaly. From 2007 to 2022, Native actors held less than .25 percent of speaking roles in film.

But the number of Native actors in Hollywood has grown a lot since Woon-A-Tai started acting at age 15, and as Indigenous stories become more visible in film and TV—Rutherford Falls, Echo, True Detective: Night Country, and Prey, among others—Woon-A-Tai wants to make sure they’re told right, as opposed to years past when white actors were cast as Natives in redface, while actual Indigenous actors were relegated to “very stereotypical, racist” roles. “It was never like we weren’t in film,” he says. “It was just that we had very bad representation.” Now, he adds, “I think we’re pushing to a time when we don’t need anybody to tell our story for us.”

Getting it right, Woon-A-Tai says, means “if you want to make a story regarding Native people, it should definitely be mandatory, in my opinion, to have a Native director, Native writer, and Native casting director,” he says. To any non-Indigenous casting directors thinking there are “not enough Native actors” out there, Woon-A-Tai calls BS. “I just feel like they’re not looking; [they’re only looking in certain places]....We’re everywhere. We’re in cities, rural areas, reservations. You can look anywhere, and you’ll definitely find Natives who are willing to try to act.”

Casting agents certainly have Woon-A-Tai’s number. He’s already costarred with Maddie Ziegler in the coming-of-age film Fitting In, and appeared in the comedic slasher Hell of a Summer, codirected by Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard. Next, he’ll star in A24’s Warfare, a film about the Iraq War from director Alex Garland (Ex Machina; Civil War) and Ray Mendoza.

Woon-A-Tai hints he’ll portray Mendoza, who served in the Navy for 16-plus years and cowrote and codirected the film with Garland. “Being able to tell a story from a Native soldier’s lens is very important,” Woon-A-Tai says.

In the future, Woon-A-Tai wants to write, direct, produce, expand his modeling career, and, of course, continue uplifting his community: “My goal is, honestly, to get Natives paid.”

Hair by Anton Alexander for Kérastase; makeup by Grace Ahn at Day One; manicure by Merrick Fisher and Naoko Saita at Opus Beauty; produced by Production Partners; photographed on location at The Hollywood Roosevelt.

A version of this article appears in the June/July 2024 issue of ELLE.

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