Chaske Spencer

Watch what Chaske Spencer does when someone else is talking. In The English (2022), Emily Blunt's Cornelia sits by a wagon in the dark and talks, because talking is how she keeps her nerve, and Spencer's Eli Whipp lets her. He does not nod along and he does not wait for his turn. He listens like a man who has spent his life being looked at by people who made up their minds about him before he opened his mouth, and when he answers it is a sentence, not a speech. It is the best scene in the opening hour and nobody in it moves.

That kind of quiet took him a long time to be allowed. He started in theatre in New York, made his feature debut in Skins (2002), and did early television in Into the West and Dreamkeeper. Then came the Twilight films, as pack leader Sam Uley from New Moon (2009) through Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012), a part that asked for a body built for it and not a great deal else. The decade after was recurring television, Banshee (2014–2016), Sneaky Pete (2017–2018), Blindspot (2019–2020), and a run of independent films with more on their minds: Winter in the Blood (2013), Woman Walks Ahead (2017) with Michael Greyeyes, and Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.'s Wild Indian (2021), where he played Teddo, a man carrying guilt he cannot set down. We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to, but the line through them is clear: he was getting better at doing less.

Hugo Blick's series is where the stillness finally had six hours to work in. Spencer has said he "wanted to play him as a vet... Eli, to me, is a Vietnam vet who rides around on a Harley-Davidson in the Southwest, listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival", which is an odd note for a Pawnee ex-scout and exactly right for the performance: a man who has served, has come home to nothing, and is not interested in explaining himself. He moved us more than we expected in a series we liked with reservations, and the reason is simple: he never once asks for it. Blunt does the work of feeling on screen; Spencer does the work of not showing it, and it is his face we remembered afterwards.

The reservation is about the parts, not the actor. He is cast, over and over, as a Native American man in a Western or a period piece, and in the ensemble films that has sometimes meant standing at the edge of somebody else's story: in Woman Walks Ahead the Native characters, his among them, were given less to do than the white lead. Supporting parts in other people's dramas rarely give him the time for the quiet to register. Echo (2024), a Marvel series, has since put him in franchise television, which is not a form known for letting a man sit by a wagon and say nothing. Somebody should try it again anyway.