Devery Jacobs plays people who have already decided to leave and are waiting for everyone else to notice. On Reservation Dogs she carried the grief without speaking it, then joined the writers' room and directed; we know the actor better than the filmmaker.
Fi1m perspective
There is a look Devery Jacobs gives in Reservation Dogs (2021) whenever somebody else says the word California. Elora Danan Postoak is the one of the four who has done the sums and means to go, and Jacobs plays the going as something already settled, so the plan itself hardly needs saying. What got at us was how she carries the grief. Nobody makes a speech about Daniel; his name comes up sideways, in a photograph or a pause, and Jacobs's face does the rest of the work, and did more to us than anything said out loud in three seasons.
She has been at this a while. Small television parts began in 2007, and the first role people noticed was Aila in Jeff Barnaby's Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), a lead her collaborators still describe in terms of grit and vulnerability, a flawed character making difficult decisions. The parts that followed offered less, and rather than wait she started writing and directing shorts in 2016, beginning with Stolen, about missing and murdered Indigenous women, while working at a Native women's shelter. American Gods (2019–2021) and The Order (2019–2020) put her in front of a wider audience. Then Sterlin Harjo cast her as Elora. Of that audition she has said: "Basically every step of the way I had to fight, but I ended up booking the role."
Reservation Dogs is also where the two halves of her work meet. She joined the writers' room in the second season and directed an episode in the third, and the series as a whole is the thing we can vouch for: funny, patient, heavy with a sadness it never announces. We have not seen enough of her direction to separate it from Harjo's, and we will not pretend to. The features she has since led, This Place (2022) and Backspot (2024), the latter made with D.W. Waterson, with whom she runs the company Night is Y, we have not reviewed, so we name them and leave them there.
What she does best on screen is hold still while other people talk. D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai's Bear talks, Paulina Alexis's Willie Jack talks, and Jacobs listens, and the scene leans towards her. The risk for an actor like that is being cast for stillness until it hardens into a habit. Her own films, which she has pointed towards Indigenous and queer stories, suggest she does not intend to wait to be cast at all. Start with Reservation Dogs, and watch her when California comes up.
Biography
Devery Jacobs, also credited as Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, is a Canadian Mohawk actress, writer and director. She was born on 8 August 1993 in Kahnawake, Quebec.
Jacobs began acting in the late 2000s. Her breakout role came in the 2013 film Rhymes for Young Ghouls, for which she received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Actress. She is best known for portraying Elora Danan Postoak in the FX series Reservation Dogs (2021–2023), on which she also worked as a writer and director.
Other credits include American Gods (2017–2021), The Order (2019–2020) and the film Blood Quantum (2019). She has written and directed several short films.
