By Wolf Schneider

For a while, around the time of Dances With Wolves, the most-talked-about Native American actor in Hollywood was Rodney A. Grant. Then, around the time of The Last of the Mohicans and Geronimo, it became Wes Studi. Now -- putting aside major movie stars with mixed heritage, like part-Cherokees Johnny Depp and Val Kilmer -- the actor to know about is Michael Greyeyes.

One look at this guy and you can see why. At 6'2" and 200 pounds, he's got a dancer's grace (he spent a decade on the ballet circuit) and an athlete's muscles. Full-lipped, with shoulder-length dark hair and wide-set, steady eyes, 30-year-old Greyeyes, who's full-blooded Cree, more than fits the romanticized ideal of a people that once thrived free and in harmony with nature.

As for his dramatic abilities -- well, as the romantic lead in the highly-rated telemovie Stolen Women, he was bold enough to convince Janine Turner that life in the pioneer fort was drudgery compared to sharing his tent; in the popular cable movie Crazy Horse, he carried out a vision of a spiritual warrior with enormous charisma; and in the miniseries True Women, he developed a speech pattern for his threatening yet proud Tarantula that gave new meaning to the term "broken English." He seems to have the chops for that expansion of self and heightened awareness that Stanislavki considered so key to believable acting.

Greyeyes has been quickly swept up in whirl of we-need-a-Native roles -- a stint as an angry brave on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; parts in TV's Rough Riders, MIllennium, and Magnificent Seven; and finally, a big budget action feature, this winter's Firestorm, alongside Scott Glenn and Howie Long. No wonder A-list director Jan De Bont (Twister) has been considering him for his sci-fi/Western, Ghost Riders in the Sky.

While Greyeyes is physically so consummate so as to be idealized, he is in his personal life hardly stereotypical. Although he rides a horse bare-back and deep-seated on-screen, real life finds him allergic to animals. He's never lived on a reservation, but mostly in Toronto, New York, and now Cleveland, and admits, "I'm really a city boy." To get out in nature he neither hikes nor tracks nor hunts, but bicycles with his wife, Nancy Leroszewski, who performs with the Cleveland Ballet.

Even if he is rarely there, he does carry in high regard the region he considers his ancestral home, Saskatchewan. There, he spent his childhood and often visited his mother's true home, the Sweetgrass Reserve, as well as his father's, the Muscade Lake Reserve. "The landscape is quite flat," he describes, "but there are gentle rolling hills and beautiful sky. It's a little like Montana. Our nation is called the Plains Cree Nation." He adds, "The Cree are known for their artists."

Although he was taken with powwow dancing (and continues to practice it), Greyeyes spent his teens studying at The National Ballet School in Toronto, then joined the National Ballet of Canada. It went well for him, but he walked away from that life five years ago for the same reason most dancers do - "I'd come home at seven, absolutely exhausted. Too tired to make dinner. I'd sit there,with five or six ice bags on various different parts of my body, throbbing with pain. 'This isn't living.'"

Greyeyes switched careers, and he got lucky again -- luck being one of the refrains he identifies in his life. "I got into Hollywood at a time when it was right to cast real Indian people in these roles. By virtue of that, I was auditioning for these parts against less competition. Instead of 1,000 guys reading for Crazy Horse, there were 50 guys. And politically, it was impossible not to cast a full-blood in that role."

He made his own luck when Stolen Women aired on CBS -- and hundreds of viewers clamored to know who this hunky newcomer was. Greyeyes laughs, "My agents started to complain, 'We're getting calls and letters every day.'"

Although he is frequently cast to play proud and withdrawn characters, Greyeyes can readily slip into humor. This lighter side gets tapped in Firestorm, playing a helicopter pilot who flies smoke-jumpers like Scott Glenn around as they struggle to stanch a forest fire that was started as camouflage for a prison break. "I play a happy-go-lucky guy. In general, I play a lot of tough guys, but he's different -- Andy Mooseheart. The first scene I'm in, I'm bopping around in my helicopter singing 'Whiskey in a Bottle' by Thin Lizzie."

Although he's made quick strides in Hollywood and travels in cosmopolitan circles, Greyeyes is no stranger to cultural confusion. "I'm still startled by the ignorant things I hear," he says. He recalls a woman who recently boasted to him how she was so into appropriating sacred Native sweats and ceremonies and rituals. "She was saying, 'But don't you think spirituality has a universalism, and don't you feel we should be able to share this knowledge with each other?' I said to her, 'How would you feel if I said that I really love what Catholics are doing, and I think it's important so we're celebrating mass at our house, we're giving communion.'"

As attached as he is to his Native identity, Greyeyes hopes not to be pigeon-holed by it: "I've been very fortunate to get a lot of these great roles because I'm Native. But if I'm limited to these roles then when Westerns go out of fashion, I'll be out of work. I'd love to do modern films, I'd love to be a cop," he says. And yes, he'd even move to L.A. if he had to.

Wolf Schneider, who is the senior editor of Movieline and former editor of American Film, divides her time between Los Angeles and Santa Fe.

Copyright ©1998 Cowboys & Indians

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Michael Greyeyes