[This story contains spoilers from the Dark Winds season three premiere.]
Dark Winds returned with season three on Sunday and eagle-eyed viewers might have recognized two shady characters in Lt. Joe Leaphorn’s jail cell. That would be Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin and the Sundance Kid himself, Robert Redford. They appear around halfway through the premiere episode, as Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) is investigating the disappearance of two teenage boys.
Leaphorn arrives at the police station, where he’s about to face an FBI agent (played by Jenna Elfman) who’s looking into the disappearance of B.J. Vines — which Leaphorn knows something about, having left him for dead in season two — when he stops over at the holding cell. There, the two inmates are playing chess. Leaphorn suggests a move, which gives Martin a checkmate, and Redford replies, “Thanks a lot.”
The Hollywood Reporter talked to the series’ showrunner and executive producer John Wirth (who’s already hard at work in the season four writers room) about how the dual cameo came to be, along with the rest of the premiere episode.
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It’s nice to see the show is back. It feels like forever since season two came out in 2023. I assume you were affected by the strikes?
Oh yeah, it was a double whammy with the actors and the writers [strikes]. I was hoping we could maybe get a jump on it and start in the spring of 2023; it was not meant to be, so we endured that. Dan McDermott [AMC president of entertainment] had promised me before we went out that the day after the strike was settled, whenever that may be, we would be back in the writers room, and that’s pretty much what happened.
I’d like to talk about those cameos. Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin have been champions of the Tony Hillerman books that the series is based on for a long time and were instrumental in getting it to the screen. It must have been fun to have them make an appearance. Whose idea was it, and how did you decide now was the right time?
Any time would be a good time to put those two gentlemen on film and in the show. I’m not sure whose idea it was or if it was anybody’s idea. It had certainly occurred to me that it would be a wonderful idea. It may have been pitched to me by Tina Elmo or Chris Eyre [who are executive producers], I don’t really remember. I was trying to get something going in season two, and I had several ideas for a cameo.
George R.R. Martin had appeared on the Jimmy Fallon show and had done a funny sketch about his inability to finish his Game of Thrones series of novels, and I found that very amusing and thought George was really gracious about being open about how long it takes to write those books, and when I spoke to him about that later, I started talking with him and with Bob [Redford] about could we do some sort of cameo in season two. Bob was, to my surprise, pretty game, he was ready to go. George was a little more circumspect, and I wrote up a couple of things and gave them to them, and one or the other was not enthusiastic about what we were going to do.
Then I came up with something that was sort of a weird Men in Black takeoff I wanted to do at the very end of season two, and both George and Bob were visiting the set one day and Bob said he would do it if George would do it, but we couldn’t get George to say yes and we all kind of ganged up on him in that moment and tried to get him to say yes and he was just reluctant. He just wouldn’t commit to it. So the whole thing kind of fell apart and I thought it would never come to fruition.
So how did it eventually come about?
We wrapped the show [for season two], went away, came back, did the writers strike, and we came back. I think we shot this cameo on April 4, believe it or not I remember that day, it was a Tuesday, and it was not easy getting the two guys’ schedules hooked up. Tina Elmo was instrumental in making all those arrangements. Then George told me he had an idea — he was suddenly enthusiastic to do this, and his idea was that he and Bob would play two guys who were in the jail cell in our home set, the Navajo Tribal Police, and they wanted to be playing a game of chess. I thought, “OK, sure, why not?” I just kind of let it go, I thought if it happens, it happens. It’s not really scripted, there’s no reason to write anything down, we’ll just be there and get them in the scene and that’ll be that.
Then I got a call saying Bob wants to see the script, meaning his part. I thought, “OK, well, I’ll write this down,” it’s only about a half page or maybe less. I was told the guys did not want to talk, so there was no dialogue in it at all. I sent it over and then I heard, “Bob wants to know what his dialogue is,” so this thing is evolving as we go. Suddenly they want to talk, so I asked what was it he thought he wanted to say? Maybe it was George who [had the idea that] they’d be playing chess and Bob would say something like, “George what’s taking so long? The whole world’s waiting.” And I wrote that down. I sent those pages over, and I thought this was never really going to happen, even though we were prepared for it and we scheduled it.
Tuesday arrived and I was sitting in my office in Santa Fe, writing. I thought today’s going to come and go and this isn’t going to happen. Then I got a phone call from our production assistant and she said, “The eagle has landed.” (Laughs) I’m like, “OK, which eagle is this?” “Bob is here.” It’s like, “OK, maybe this is going to happen.” I scrambled out of my office, and went out to the set, where we had fixed up a place where he could be. We had a closed set that day. George was already there, Bob was there, and we were sitting in this little green room and they decided they were going to rehearse this scene. I had heard Bob wanted to call George “Gene.” I had written the couple lines of dialogue and used the name Gene. Bob was looking at it and he said to me, “Who is Gene?” I said, “I thought that’s what you wanted to call George.” He said, “No, I’ll just call him George.” So we made that little change.
Backing up, I don’t know anything about chess, I don’t play chess, I don’t know what the chess pieces are called, what the moves are, but I know there’s a lot of specific language around the game of chess. I don’t know any of it. So I had to find somebody who played chess, because I didn’t want those two icons to be sitting in front of a camera and not know what they were supposed to be doing. We spent some time trying to find a chess expert, and we finally found Justin Skliar, a scientist who worked at the Los Alamos Labs, so I told him, that the show was set in the ’70s and I just need a very simple move where a guy can move one piece and say checkmate. He said yes, this was something he could do. He arrived [on set] right around the time the guys did, and that’s when I told him who was going to be in the scene, and he just turned ashen. (Laughs.) Like, “What? Oh my God, those two guys?” He had never been on a movie set, that was all something new, and to interact with Robert Redford and George Martin was pretty intense for him.
As it turns out, George is quite an accomplished chess player, so he was able to set up the board and put all the pieces where they would be in order for him to make this move, which would checkmate his opponent. Everything was ready to go, and also on that day — Jenna Elfman is in the show this year, and that was her first day of shooting. I had to go to her and say, “Listen, you are so important to the show and I’m so thrilled that you’re on the show and very excited for you to work today, but it’s not going to be about you at all today because Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin are here and they are doing a cameo in your first scene.” She said, “Oh, that’s cool, great. Can I meet them?” She was absolutely gracious, totally professional, and was thrilled to meet those two guys and then just hung out waiting for her turn to get in front of the camera.
So how did filming go?
We rehearsed it, we set up the camera — it was a sophisticated camera move Chris Eyre had planned for the shot — we got everything ready to go, and then we shot them. We did a couple of angles. Bob is, like me, a little bit older, and I was afraid he was going to get tired and we were taking too much time, but in the process of shooting it I saw him just take a deep breath and become Robert Redford right before my eyes. He’s really fun in the scene. He’s everything he ever was and that you would want him to be, and it was absolutely thrilling to stand here and watch him do that. And George was absolutely in the moment and game and seemed to have a lot of fun doing it, as well.
It was really a thrill. Here we are, we’re totally in the Dark Winds world, and all of a sudden we take a 30-second detour and go over to the jail cell, and there’s the most iconic movie actor that’s ever been in film, in my humble opinion, and the greatest science fiction writer that’s ever lived in America. There those two are, and they have a little scene with Zahn McClarnon, and then he walks away to play the scene with Jenna Elfman’s character and we just carry on. So we had a little out-of-time moment with the two guys, and then onward with the show. It plays very well. We saw it last night [March 6] at the premiere and people really reacted — they knew immediately who those two guys were. We kept a lid on it, we have not advertised it or told anybody that it’s there, so it’s going to be a nice little surprise for people. They’ll see it and go, “Hold on now,” and then rewind and look at it again and go, “Oh my God, that happened.” It’s one of the highlights of my career: I have a script that says written by me and Robert Redford is in that script and he’s saying words on film that I did not write but the script says written by me, so I’m taking credit for it anyway. (Laughs)
You mentioned Jenna Elfman (of Dharma & Greg fame), who plays FBI special agent Sylvia Washington. Her character initially doesn’t seem to know much about the reservation, but she very quickly seems suspicious of Leaphorn. Does she have his number already?
She’s such a fine-tuned actor, she completely understood the part, she understood how to play it. She seems in the beginning like kind of a quirky, lost young white woman on the reservation who isn’t going to be much of a problem, and then, you know, turns out she’s very quickly under his skin, she puts him on edge right away. That story gets very intense as we go along, and it has a pretty interesting conclusion in episode eight.
As a police officer and as a father whose son’s death was caused by B.J. Vines, Leaphorn seems conflicted about having taken his revenge by leaving Vines out in the desert to freeze to death.
Henry Leaphorn, who’s a retired Navajo officer and Joe Leaphorn’s father, at one point in season two says, “There’s a difference between white man’s justice and Indian justice,” and he predicts that B.J. Vines will walk out of jail, he’ll get his high-priced attorneys to get him out of jail, after he was arrested for the murder of Henry’s grandson and Joe’s son — and that’s exactly what happened. I think Joe Leaphorn just had a little bit of a break and took him out to the desert, and he didn’t shoot him in the head, but left him to die and in fact, he did die. Season three is all about: What are the consequences of having done that?
There’s a great line that Graham Roland wrote in season two where he said, “When you kill a man, he stays with you, he’s bound to you.” I just went with that concept and thought, what would happen if B.J. Vines was bound to Leaphorn, how would that manifest through the season? We combine that with Navajo mythology, mostly invented by us, in this Ye’iitsoh monster. My thought about it was, I talked to Zahn about it, this monster is deeply ingrained within you and your fear is that you are being turned into a monster and you’re trying desperately to exorcise this thing from within you. When you accomplish that, suddenly that monster is out in the world, and now you have to deal with it out in the world and that’s kind of the story for season three. It turned out really well, I have to say. We’re kind of doing a horror movie. In season two we did kind of what we call Navajo noir, and in season three we’re doing Navajo horror.
There’s so much percolating already in the first episode. What clues can you give us about the rest of the season going forward?
I would just say, without giving any spoilers, that it’s like death and taxes being the two things you can count on in life. One of the things, having done it a couple of times: Moving is sometimes threatening to a marriage because it’s so intense. I’m invested in the Leaphorns’ marriage, and the writers wrote a lot of wonderful things in season two. In season three when we started following this concept of, when you kill a man he’s bound to you and how is Leaphorn haunted by it, I thought, “This has to blow back on his marriage somehow.” So there is a really good exploration of what the death of a child can do to a married couple this season and how a man who has such a strong moral compass is affected by that moment in time when he set the compass down for a moment, did something and then picked the compass up. It’s not free. That’s what he’s trying to come to terms with this year.
I think that’s a great place to leave it. Is there anything else you want to mention?
Season four is turning out to be pretty exciting as well. But I can’t tell you anything about that until next year at this time. (Laughs)
I’m looking forward to many more seasons, and I know you’ve got a lot of books to work with.
We sure do. Thank you, Mr. Hillerman.
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Dark Winds season three airs on Sundays on AMC and streams on AMC+.
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