Zahn McClarnon on Joe Leaphorn’s Ketamine Dream

[Trigger warning: This story contains a discussion of sexual abuse of children. It also includes Dark Winds spoilers through season three, episode six, “Abidoo’niidee (What We Had Been Told).”]

If you caught the latest episode of Dark Winds and you need another minute to process it all, you’re not alone.

Season three is reaching a fever pitch, with episode six going deep in its exploration of Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) and the challenges he faces both externally, as he tries to catch a killer while evading suspicion for his own crime, and internally as he struggles to reconcile his role in B.J. Vines’ death with his sense of justice. The tense episode also circles back to events previewed in the season premiere, when Joe was shot in the neck with a dart as he faces an adversary in the desert.

This time, viewers experienced that precarious situation in its full context: Joe is in a fight to save himself and the teenage George Bowlegs from a menacing attacker he believes is the Ye’iitsoh monster. The dart, as it turns out, has been laced with a substance that causes him to have surreal dreams that delve into his psyche, bringing up long-buried memories of a priest who sexually abused Joe’s cousin many years ago. In the dream, he also faces the threat of FBI Agent Washington (Jenna Elfman) uncovering his crime, as well as the fallout on his marriage.

At the heart of the episode, Joe learns that his father, Henry (Joseph Runningfox), killed the priest after Joe revealed the abuse out of despair for justice, much like what Joe experienced when Vines was released from custody after he caused the death of Joe Jr. Their shared heartbreak highlights “the gap between institutional justice and true justice, and the price paid for both,” says Erica Tremblay, who directed the episode.

“It is a story about the monsters we face, both literal and figurative, and how the strength to face them often comes from the stories our ancestors left us,” Tremblay tells The Hollywood Reporter. When Joe awakes from the dream, he’s able to fight off the attacker, wounding him with a gunshot, and realizes that it was never a monster after all.

Below, star Zahn McClarnon discusses the multilayered episode — which weaves in Navajo mythology with Leaphorn’s challenges — touching on why that abuse storyline hit close to home and what Joe has going for him even in his darkest moments. Says McClarnon, “He has a chance to lose everything: his wife, his family, his job, his freedom. How can the stakes be any higher than that?”

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There’s a lot to unpack in this episode, with several different narrative threads happening at once: the mythological story of the Hero Twins taking on the Ye’iitsoh monster; Leaphorn’s struggle to fight the attacker that’s coming after him and George; and the surreal dream-world that he’s navigating. I read that you have a fraternal twin in real life, which is kind of fitting for the twin storyline.

I do, he’s four minutes younger.

The story of the twins is represented by a stage play happening within the episode. Is that based on real mythology?

It’s based on a creation story, the Diné, or Navajo creation story of the Hero Twins, the Monster Slayer and Born for Water. These twins are embarking on a battle of the Ye’iitsoh. The direct translation of “Ye’iitsoh” is essentially something big that creates fear. Today it’s kind of a general term that means something with negative energy.

Then there’s the battle. Joe’s battling his own monsters throughout this episode, and we include narration woven throughout the amateur production of the kids [portraying the Hero Twins] in this episode. It’s Joe’s journey.

One of the elements of Joe’s journey, which takes up a relatively small amount of time but seems very important, is the interaction he has with his wife, Emma (Deanna Allison), in the dream. After he told her about Vines in episode five, she asked him to move out of the house, which is shocking because they’ve always had such a loving marriage. Now, in the dream, she says that he’s not giving enough attention to the things that she needs, and it seems like they’re at a breaking point.

During the — I call it a ketamine dream — he gets shot in the neck with an animal tranquilizer dart, which usually is ketamine, they use ketamine to tranquilize animals. In this ketamine dream, Joe is exposed to a lot of his inner turmoil and trauma. There are different characters that come through the ketamine, and one is definitely Emma. There’s a lot going on there. There’s a lot of guilt of how his marriage with Emma is a mess, it’s revealed to him subconsciously in this dream, and how he treats her and how Joe puts his job ahead of their marriage. Basically how the job has consumed everything about him, as well as the death [of their son]. For this whole season we’re exploring those areas of Joe and Emma’s relationship.

Emma comes in the dream and basically says, “You’re not paying attention, you’re not here for me.” It’s a part of the psychological makeup of Joe Leaphorn and the things he’s going through. The whole season is basically a continued exploration of the ramifications of their son’s death and the consequences that come from Joe Leaphorn’s actions in season two with B.J. Vines, and also how it affects his mental state and his marriage with Emma, as well as [his relationship with] Chee [Kiowa Gordon] and Bernadette [Jessica Matten] — Bernadette’s not really around in season three, she’s down at the border — but everything around him in his life and how these decisions and his son’s death have affected him. We explore quite a bit the inner workings of Joe Leaphorn.

I hadn’t quite made the connection that ketamine was in the dart.

Yeah, they use ketamine nowadays a lot in trauma therapy, for people dealing with different issues in their lives. The research nowadays with psilocybin and ketamine for depression and anxiety — they’ve come a long way with that. We touch on it in 1972. (Laughs)

Maybe there’s an accidental benefit for Joe.

Yeah, exactly.

One of the darkest things that’s addressed in the episode is Joe’s memories of his youth and how his cousin was abused by a priest, which he knew about at the time, but couldn’t stop it. Can you talk about how that is addressed?

Joe revisits an event in his childhood where he wasn’t able to protect his younger cousin when he’s abused by a priest. That causes Joe a lot of trauma in his youth, a lot of guilt because he couldn’t protect him, and he also mixed the events up in his head as a child — you know how we kind of use those tools in adulthood to deal with the trauma. We rearrange stories in our heads.

Joe finds out in this ketamine dream that it went differently than he thought. He blamed himself [thinking that he killed the priest, which he wanted to do]; he lived with this guilt his entire life, but it’s revealed in the ketamine dream what actually happened to the priest: It wasn’t Joe who killed the priest, it was revealed that his father did that to protect him and his cousin, to get “Indian justice.” It was revealed that Henry, Joe’s father, also lives with a lot of trauma and guilt because he forced the kids to go to that church, which turned into an abusive situation. So Henry’s also dealing with a lot of that guilt and trauma. Joe realizes this about his father, which does bring them closer.

Joe tells his father that he did the right thing, and Henry replies that he can tell Joe’s not sure. They’re both struggling because there really is no right way to respond to a situation where someone is doing something evil, but you have no legal recourse. What do you think of that dilemma that they both face?

It’s a different time period. It’s 1972 and a lot of people on the reservations did face that quite a bit, where there’s two types of justice: There’s one justice one for white people and one justice for Native people. It’s that law that Joe has to struggle with as well in his personal life, because he’s a cop and also follows his traditions as a Diné man, a Navajo man. He’s constantly struggling with colonialism and being colonized and also representing his people, so it’s a fence that Joe is continually walking throughout all the seasons.

And then obviously we have Agent Washington, who comes into the dream saying, “What you did to Vines is immoral.” So Joe is constantly dealing with these moral gray areas throughout the season. What’s right and what’s wrong when it comes to holding up the law? Are there two different laws, one for Indian people and one for white people? She represents the fact that in Joe’s heart he probably does know what he did doesn’t square up to his principles, and he has to face that.

Regarding the abuse of Joe’s cousin by the priest, Erica Tremblay, who directed this episode, said that “working with Zahn to bring this story to life is an experience I will treasure forever. We were able to lean on each other through the most emotionally challenging scenes, and the result feels true and raw because we trusted each other enough to really explore these painful memories.” How was that experience for you, working with her to create a representation of these things that, sadly, happened?

Any actor, when he has to be vulnerable, wants a safe place to be vulnerable. We had closed sets on some of the scenes, where it was just the camera and the first AD and Erica and I. Erica made that environment extremely safe — not just Erica, the whole cast and crew made that environment extremely safe for me so I could go to those places and be vulnerable.

To be honest with you, as actors we all have to tap into personal experiences. Erica made it easy for me to tap into that. I had some very, very similar things happen to me as a child that my cousin went through, and also what Joe went through of not being able to protect somebody. For me, having access to that and being around people who are going to allow me to have access to that and keep me safe, Erica handled it really well. I trusted her and she’s a wonderful director to work with. It’s all about the safe environment. Not luckily, but fortunately, but I had a lot of that stuff to tap into.

That is really unfortunate to hear.

Everybody has their — it doesn’t define me, some of the things that happened in my childhood. I don’t want people feeling sorry for me or anything, because everybody’s got their traumas and things that have happened to them. It’s just wonderful that as an actor, I allow myself to tap into that stuff, and I think to bring some kind of truth to those situations is very important and I’m always striving to bring as much truth to the scene as I possibly can. It’s a lot easier not to have to make it up, that’s for sure. (Laughs)

Once Joe gets out of the dream, he’s still in a bad situation. He’s figured out a lot of things and he’s able to shoot and wound the suspect, but he’s badly injured and stranded in the desert — plus, if he gets out of this, he could be arrested at any time by Agent Washington. What do you think Joe has working for him that he can use to get out of this mess that he’s still in at the end of the episode?

Pragmatically, he’s got his experience as a cop, obviously. But Joe comes face to face with himself in this episode and understands how these past events shaped him and why he dealt with them through suppression. It’s just a coping mechanism, that’s what we do as human beings; and Joe does, finally, as do the Hero Twins in our creation story in the play, he battles the monsters. He’s battling the monster himself, and finds out later on that it’s not a monster, that this is a man. He’s just projected all this trauma and guilt, and it appears to him as a monster, but it’s really a man.

He’s put all that guilt and trauma in something that wasn’t reality. We do that as human beings, but he comes out of that dream and it’s almost a relief to him to realize that this has all been him and his psyche that’s been creating this. He has to get his job done. He has to find the killer who killed Ernesto Cata at the beginning of the season. He has a job to do, so he snaps out of it. Knowing that it’s a man is a big relief to Joe. It wasn’t this monster — but it was a monster, if that makes sense. It was a monster, but it’s not a [supernatural] monster.

I think that came up in a previous season, too, whether there are really monsters or if it’s just people who are monsters.

Henry talks about that as well when Joe meets up with his father in the ketamine dream. I think that Leaphorn’s growth is more about self-understanding. It is about healing and reconciliation of the traumatic past and the choices he’s made and how they’ve affected everybody around him.

Agent Washington clearly knows more than she’s letting on about Joe’s involvement with B.J. Vines. Joe must realize that on some level, as a police officer himself. So he’s in a very tricky spot. And I don’t want you to give away any spoilers, but how could he possibly get out of this?

It definitely raises the stakes. It raises the highest stakes, when Agent Washington comes sniffing around about B.J. Vines and what happened to him. He’s a prominent character within the community, the white community, the border town community, the Navajo reservation. She’s been sent off from Washington as one of the first women FBI agents in the ’70s, I think there were two in 1972. She’s sloughed off to the reservation by her bosses, to go take care of this missing persons report on the Navajo reservation. She’s getting kind of the shitty work as a woman in ’72. She shows up and the stakes become really high for Joe, because he has a chance to lose everything: his wife, his family, his job, his freedom. How can the stakes be any higher than that? It creates a lot of anxiety for Joe in season three. Done by the wonderful actress, and she just nailed this season, Jenna Elfman.

What was it like working with Jenna?

Jenna’s just a professional, she’s such a pro and such a warm person and easy to work with. I found myself just sitting in some of these scenes and I’m just watching her and I remember, “Oh shit, I have to say my dialogue back to her,” because I’m so amazed at her work. That doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does you really have to focus and remember that you’re in the scene. I just love to watch Jenna, I’d come [to set] on scenes when I wasn’t working just to watch her, see how many different takes she would do and how many different versions. She just never made any mistakes. She’s been doing this for so long. Once in a while, you see her flub up, and it’s like, “Ah, she’s human.”

I’d also like to say that when Leaphorn is injured, like he is in this episode, you play that in such a realistic way. You really feel his struggle, as opposed to action movies where the hero will be shot but he goes on fighting bad guys like nothing happened. I don’t know if you think about that or if it’s written that way?

I do, I’m constantly searching for an honesty to the performance. It’s so important to me and it does take a lot of focus for me. I have to be that person in that moment, and you know, I’ve got everybody creating that environment for me. The least I can do is bring an honesty to it and do my job. Everybody’s working their butts off to make the environment and create the sets, etc., so I’d better bring everything that I can.

It doesn’t matter if I’m getting shot or I’m in a scene where I’m talking, I’ve got to tap into that honesty. It’s a part of the craft that I really enjoy, and when I watch other actors, I want that honesty. You know, the pureness of it. I strive for that as much as I possibly can. It takes work, it takes a lot of focus and that’s what I’m there for, I’m there to work. I take it seriously and I want it to be as honest and authentic as possible. I appreciate that compliment, that’s very kind.

So much so that in season two, when he had the broken arm, I almost couldn’t watch that part.

There were some scenes there I actually got hurt. There was a moment in season two where Nicholas Logan [who plays the hired murderer that killed Joe Jr.] pulls me off my feet when I got a rope around him, and I landed on my ribs and we kept rolling. I was in a lot of pain. (Laughs.) So some of that’s real.

It certainly seemed real. Anything else you’d like to discuss about the season so far?

Just kind of explaining what the Ye’iitsoh is; authenticity is a big concern for us. We have wonderful consultants, Jennifer and [Manuelito] “Manny” Wheeler, and in a previous season we had George Joe — just making sure they’re involved in the ceremonies, the language, the props, the wardrobe, things that are true to Navajo customs. We’ve got a lot of people behind the scenes that are Indigenous, and we want to make sure that we’re showcasing the tribal culture with respect and honor and authenticity.

We don’t represent the Navajo people obviously, we’re doing a TV show, but one of the positive things is it does open the door to moments of the culture that I hope inspire people to be around Navajo people, to visit the Navajo Nation, to learn more about their culture. That can lead to more people getting involved, environmentally, politically. That’s one of the positive rewards about being on Dark Winds.

The Ye’iitsoh is definitely a part of that oral story, the creation story of the Navajo people. We make sure it’s authentic and we have the right people in place to honor that and respect it.

The show centers the Navajo perspective, which of course has always been there, but wasn’t represented in mainstream media for a long time. It’s a shame it hasn’t been done in this way in the U.S. until relatively recently; imagine all the shows we could have had.

It’s definitely a better time in representation in television and film, for sure, because now we have Native writers, we have Native directors, we have Native producers. But we’re just at the beginning stages. We’ve been telling these stories for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and we’re just finally getting the opportunity for other people to see it. The show’s perspective, it’s got a cultural lean to it, and that’s one of the positive things about being involved. And it’s connecting with people, people are connecting with it and that’s just a win-win for being on a television show.

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Dark Winds season three airs on Sundays on AMC and streams on AMC+. See THR’s interviews about the season with showrunner John Wirth and co-star Jessica Matten.