Over four seasons, AMC’s “Dark Winds” has become one of the most compelling crime dramas on television. Set in the American Southwest during the 1970s and based on the novels by Tony Hillerman, the series follows Navajo Tribal Police officers as they investigate crimes that often intersect with personal history, spiritual beliefs, and the complexities of identity.
Season Four picks up in the shadow of the Season Three finale, where every character is carrying the weight of difficult choices. Zahn McClarnon’s Joe Leaphorn continues to reckon with the consequences of leaving B.J. Vines to die in the desert. Bernadette has just shot a man while saving a child aboard a train. And Jim Chee, played with charismatic confidence by Kiowa Gordon, finds himself caught between loyalty, ambition, and a growing sense that he may not fully belong anywhere.
Drawing inspiration from Hillerman’s novel The Ghost Way, the new episodes place Chee at the center of the narrative, pushing the character to confront the fractures within himself. As he grapples with Joe’s retirement, a blossoming relationship with Bernadette, and lingering doubts about his own cultural identity, Chee’s journey becomes as internal as it is investigative.
“I grew up in a Mormon conservative community in Mesa, Arizona,” Gordon shares. “I’m trying to be better and actually be closer to my culture and traditions and my language and the relationship I have to my community, my tribal community, and the greater Indian Country as well.”
That tension manifests both emotionally and physically throughout the season, particularly when Chee travels to Los Angeles in search of Billie (Isabel DeRoy-Olson), a runaway teenager being trailed by a deadly assassin played by Franka Potente. The shift in setting pulls Chee far from the reservation and into increasingly dangerous territory, forcing him to confront wounds he has tried to ignore.
“It was this whole manifestation of all his trauma building up inside of him. We had our great special effects team connecting all these tubes with the blood and mixing it with oatmeal to get those chunks and the texture right,” Gordon recalls. “I just love going into that and bearing it all out there and not having to feel any shame about it.”
Kiowa Gordon spoke with Awards Focus about the deeply personal experiences he drew upon to explore Chee’s struggle with identity, the visceral physicality of one of the season’s most unsettling scenes, and what it was like being directed by his longtime co-star Zahn McClarnon.
Awards Focus: You’re starting back on production for Season Five soon. What does it feel like to be going back for another season after seeing the responses from this current season airing?
Kiowa Gordon: It’s kind of a little overwhelming, you know. The show keeps growing and then we’re already getting back to it. It just feels nice. It just feels nice that we have such a dedicated team behind and in front of it, and the backing of AMC.
AF: This season, we’re really honing in on Chee’s background. Can you talk a little bit about reading the scripts for this season and what surprised you?
Gordon: At the end of Season Three, Bernadette had just shot a man to save a kid on a train, and Chee is going through his own thing. Joe also had his justification for leaving Vines out in the desert. So all the characters were steeped in this darkness. Heading into Season Four, I was like, “Where are we gonna take this?”
I found out we were adapting The Ghost Way, which is my favorite novel of Tony Hillerman’s. I was really stoked. I got a call from John Wirth, like a week before I was about to head to Santa Fe last year, and he said, “We’re going to focus on Chee and give you the screen time you deserve.”
That was crazy to hear. I hoped to do my part to keep this anchored and showcase what really makes Chee tick and what made him who he is in the show, and who he is to come. When we got to the second script, I was like, “Okay, I know where this is going now. This is gonna be really interesting.”
So I retreated into my place in Santa Fe and secluded up in these hills where it’s dark winds every night just howling around my house. I listened to really dark and eerie music and tried to get into that emotional state.
AF: You mentioned before that The Ghost Way is your favorite Tony Hillerman novel of the series. What is it like reading the scripts and seeing the book transposed into eight episodes?
Gordon: I’m not a purist when translating and adapting for the screen. We had to make the best TV show that we’re given. I separated it a long time ago, so it was a little easier to digest when I’m like, “Oh, I wanted this part of this book in here.”
One of the parts that I really wanted to see was this moment in the book where Chee’s following Billie in L.A. and finds her. He’s watching, and he sees this van trying to take her. He decides to pretend to be a drunk Indian walking down the street, unassuming. Then he meets Vagan and tries to help Billie, but then he gets knocked out by Vaggan and is getting pummeled. Then Billie saves Chee and gets him to the hospital, and then she dips out.
That was one of the parts where I was like, I hope they have this. I mean, there are some elements of that without going too deep into it. Chee’s uncle is absent from the show. Who knows, maybe that’ll come up later.
AF: The time frame from Season One to Season Four feels so short.
Gordon: It’s like less than a year. Yeah.
AF: Especially in the Season Four premiere, we are really seeing Chee’s feelings come out, not just for Bernadette but also for Joe, which we see in Episode Three. Why do you think Joe’s retirement and choice of successor hit Chee so hard?
Gordon: I think it’s because he gave up his old life to try to reconnect. He made his mistakes too, especially in Season One, by hiding the fact that he was an undercover FBI agent coming back and already under false pretenses.
Finding out Bern would succeed Joe pained him to be like, “Oh, this is what it felt like, probably to them.” But he’s been working hard to get in their good graces and try to help out the community the best he could. But he has his own ulterior motives, so I’m sure he was always angling to be like, “Oh, I can get a promotion at some point.” But that’s his old self talking. That’s his own ego.
It really wounded his ego and his pride, and also, Joe being kind of like a father to him, it hurt even more. It just keeps compacting, and it’s like, well, what’s gonna happen? Are you gonna pop? Are you gonna look inward and implode? Or are you gonna find a way through?
Chee also saved Joe when he was bleeding out at Coal Mine Canyon at the end of Season Three, when he was shot with that ketamine dart. Bernadette left, and still Joe picked her over Chee.
But really, it’s the seventies. His male ego is probably hurt as well. I don’t know if Chee’s actually thinking like that, but that’s just the social norm of that time.
AF: I loved Chee’s confrontation with Joe because I didn’t really realize the impact that it had on Chee. It also seemed compounded with him reconciling with not feeling Navajo enough, which is shown in the disparity between Bern’s traditional practice of her identity and Chee’s more modern approach. How did you approach that internal conflict this season and his struggle with cultural identity?
Gordon: That scene was so cool to shoot. We did it at magic hour over two different days. We did my coverage and then Zahn’s, and that was a cool way to handle that scene.
I went to my well that I have from growing up my whole life. I was both within and without in my own community because my father is not of my tribe. My mother’s tribe is Hualapai from around the Grand Canyon, so we’re neighbors to the Navajo.
But it’s funny because my dad actually went to the Navajo reservation for his Mormon mission back in the seventies. He was there for two years. He learned Navajo and he’s the one who was talking to me in Navajo.
He introduced me to some of his friends on the reservation and they helped me get the language down before I even talked to the Wheelers, who are our Navajo authority.
I think it’s just hard because when your own community that you want to be a part of is already denying you, that was hard to grasp. I didn’t really know anything when I was a kid. Then, when I moved away from the reservation to Phoenix, Arizona, that was hard. I was like a fish out of water because I wasn’t like everybody else there.
I grew up in a Mormon conservative community in Mesa, Arizona. Most of my classes were not filled with Native Americans. So I got it from that side as well. You have an identity crisis.
So I just kind of used that for Chee. Coming back to the res all the time trying to reconnect. I’m trying to be better and actually be closer to my culture and traditions and my language and the relationship I have to my community, my tribal community, and the greater Indian Country as well.
Especially when I have the platform that I do and the opportunities that I have and the privilege to be on a show like this and have this voice and this character. To be able to explore these things that nobody’s really ever looked at before.
Hopefully, it helps a kid that was like me see that they’re not the only ones. I have my own 12-year-old daughter, so I hope that she’s not struggling like that. We’re all in this society, right? It was just trying to navigate that and leaning in to try to find where Chee’s head was with all that.
AF: That reconciliation with his past and present is shown through this horrendous wound that starts to fester in Los Angeles. It physically starts to come out of him.
Gordon: Oh, that was so fun, dude.
AF: Can you talk about the physicality of representing this festering inside of him that is dying to come out?
Gordon: That’s what we were all going for. It’s a body horror thing that we’re trying to infuse into it.
When I did Season Three and Chee’s in the back of the El Camino outside, he got rejected by Bern, and then Chee’s puking. I think the writers took that and were like, “Yeah, we’re gonna have him puke again next season, but this time it’s going to be blood.” [laughs]
Jim Chory, who directed that episode, is always fun to talk to because he just cuts right to it. I’d go off into my tent, and we’d have my makeup team always reapplying all this stuff, cleaning me up, and having the masks there. I was blasting music from this hardcore band from the nineties and early two thousand.
Every time I was like, “Oh, I need to be cold in my side all the time because there’s supposed to be something stabbing me over and over.” It was nice to have it balanced out through the direction because you can easily make it very hokey and very over the top.
AF: It was great direction because I was totally disgusted. But honestly, I do hate seeing vomit on screen anyway.
Gordon: [laughs] There were some people like the scripty who were like, “I can’t watch.” I’m like, “You have to… You have your continuity.”
AF: You were also directed by Zahn this season. How does it help you as an actor to be directed by another actor?
Gordon: I mean, it’s like night and day, man. Everybody has their blind spots and their strengths and weaknesses, right?
But he has this power as an actor, so he’s an actor’s director in that respect. It really helped channel what I was doing. Sometimes I don’t get any feedback or clarification on something. He would come up and tell me what he wanted. He wouldn’t give me a line read, but it was confirmation that I needed.
It’s so good to feel that support and love from someone like him. It comes from a place of love and respect, and that’s really the crux of it.