Despite playing a police officer in HBO’s True Detective, Kali Reis hasn’t always had the best interactions with the force.
“I got assaulted by a police officer in Rhode Island when I didn't do anything,” she says frankly. “So having that flipped on its head [by playing one], it's like alright, if I got to deal with the trauma, I gotta deal with it now.”
Fortunately, Reis got justice for the incident, which took place in 2012 while she was working as door security at a nightclub. A fight broke out inside, and according to the lawsuit she filed three years later, the police officer in question punched, pepper-sprayed, and handcuffed her after she tried to administer first aid to a co-worker, who appeared to be unconscious.
“I actually found out that he was assaulting people since the year I was born – since, like, ‘86. And I was the first one to actually go through with the whole process [of prosecuting him] because people were scared.” She leans back. “I got him fired. And now I’m playing one.”
After a 13-year career in boxing, the 37-year-old is playing the lead role of Evangeline Navarro in HBO’s smash hit series, opposite none other than Hollywood legend Jodie Foster. A troubled Alaska State Trooper with a complicated past, Navarro and Foster’s character Liz Danvers have to solve a potential murder after a group of scientists go missing from their research base. And it’s big: episodes one and two averaged 12.7 million viewers, making season four the most watched of the True Detective series so far.
What makes this particularly impressive for Reis is it’s only her third ever acting role. How does that happen? “I've been in sink or swim situations most of my life and I take a comfort in knowing that I'm capable,” she says. “I've learned that I'm capable even though it looks impossible.”
And when thrown in the deep end, she swims. In London after a whistle-stop worldwide press tour, Reis is good company: engaging, funny, disarmingly frank. “I remember that coat,” she exclaims as we meet in a White City hotel, my zebra-print having made an appearance at a screening of True Detective’s dramatic finale the previous night.
Tall, self-assured, she boasts armfuls of tattoos and deep dimples courtesy of cheek piercings – piercings which have made her something of a fashion icon as True Detective draws to a close.
“There's people at’ing me like, ‘I got the piercings!’ I'm like, ‘Oh God, no, no, no,’” she laughs. “I mean, I've had them since 2009. I've been boxing the whole time with them… and I thought getting this job was gonna be the job where I’m like, ‘Alright, we're gonna finally have to take my piercings off, it's fine.’ But every job I've had, they've loved them.”
Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1986, Reis grew up the youngest of five children. An athletic child, she turned to boxing at 14, and forged it into a successful career, racking up awards for both middleweight and welterweight competitions.
Despite an intimidating string of trophies, she’s quick to stress that she’s not the same brand of hothead as her on-screen counterpart. “I think people assume personally that because [Kali’s] a fighter, don't piss her off, because she's going to punch you in the face,” she says. “I'm such a Virgo peacemaker… I don't like confrontation whatsoever.” That said, “Can I handle confrontation? Absolutely.”
And despite her career in the ring, she insists that she’s always had that creative spark. As a child, she played violin, and loved to play dress-up with her mother’s clothes, inventing characters as she did so.
She also enjoyed helping her grandmother with her latest theatre and church productions. “She had me in this reading group: it was called ‘Kicking it with my friends, this ain't no karate flick’. And we would read these little excerpts from stories we loved and we would perform them,” she says. “I was very over the top... [but] nothing too crazy. I wasn't on Broadway or anything. It was just kind of fun.”
That ‘kind of fun’ took her all the way to True Detective, but she’s had to fight against type to do it. When athletes turn their hand to acting, she says, “[producers] stick a gun in their hand, they just have them look mean. I’m very aware of my physicality. I've got that stare down. I look very intimidating. I'm very aware of that. So… how can I prove to myself and everybody else that I’m more?”
There was also the small matter of acting opposite Foster – returning to the small screen for her first leading TV role in over thirty years. “Was I terrified? Absolutely. Because I'm a huge fan,” she says; in the same breath praising Foster for being “so open; so generous with her time; her wisdom.”
With both Cape Verdean and Native American ancestry, Reis is also keenly aware of using her position in the spotlight to champion causes she’s passionate about.
That includes speaking out about issues like “missing, murdered Indigenous people, the pipelines, residential schools – I mean, the list goes on, and on,” she says. Much of her boxing career was spent raising awareness for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls movement.
This activism also sparked her acting career. Just as Reis was contemplating hanging up her gloves, filmmaker Josef Kubota Wladyka contacted her, asking to collaborate as a co-writer and star for his new project. The result was 2021’s Catch the Fair One, which she co-wrote and stars in, as a Native American boxer trying to track down her missing sister.
“He was very aware of how important the story was,” Reis says. “But he knew it wasn't his story to tell. So he reached out to me to get the perspective, seeing that I was trying to bring awareness to missing and murdered Indigenous women through boxing.”
The film premiered to rave reviews, and soon after, HBO, and director Issa López, came knocking. López, taking over from previous showrunner Nic Pizzolatto, had a singular vision for the new series of True Detective: turn away from the male-dominated seasons of the past to focus on women, and Indigenous culture in particular.
The resulting show is the latest in a line to champion Native talent: coming hot on the heels of Marvel’s Echo, Killers of the Flower Moon and even Disney/FX’s Reservation Dogs. Does Reis think things are changing?
“We've come so far,” she says. “[True Detective] couldn't come out of a more opportune time for myself, but Indigenous people as a whole… and it's not about just telling Native stories. It's seeing Native directors, actors, producers in front of the camera, makeup artists, hair stylists... we do need other allies to tell these stories, but we don't need them to tell them for us anymore.”
Case in point: Lily Gladstone, who is currently nominated for an Oscar for her role in Killers of the Flower Moon – and who accepted her Golden Globe by making a speech in the Blackfeet language, the community to which she belongs.
“I was folding laundry [when] I was watching it,” Reis remembers. “I screamed; I started crying. I never, never thought I'd see another Native person, [or] Native woman, have this platform to win a Golden Globe, or get nominated.”
Now True Detective is drawing to a close, there’s no rest for Reis: in addition to finishing up a whirlwind of press duties, she’s prepping for the release of two more films, both of which come out later this year, as well as another indie project. It certainly seems like boxing is on the back foot for now, though she’s not ruling out a return to the ring: “there’s nothing set in stone.”
And will there be another season of True Detective? Though the show is an anthology series, I’m reminded of Reis’ flippant remarks at the end of the previous night’s screening, urging people to look forward to “the Navarro spin-off!” Clearly, she’s keen: is everybody else?
Maybe. “The only way I would do that is if Issa, I, and Jodie sat down and had this conversation, 'cause it's one of those [things]: you don't want to ruin it. You don't want to ruin a good thing,” she says. “Is it possible? Absolutely. Do the people want it? Yes, give people what they want, but that's the only way I would do that.”
