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Amber Midthunder is a movie star. She’s already made a big impression in a number of projects, but an especially significant amount of Prey rests on her shoulders. She’s the beating heart of a powerful character arc, the focus of a number of very challenging set pieces, and is tasked with headlining a brand new installment of one of the most beloved sci-fi franchises out there. She exceeds expectations in all of those respects and then some in the newest Predator movie, Prey.
Midthunder plays Naru, a young Comanche woman who’s a very talented healer, but dreams of becoming a great hunter alongside her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers). Despite pushback from her mother (Michelle Thrush), other hunters, and village expectations, Naru commits to tracking down the mysterious threat that lurks in the woods nearby. Little does she know, this creature isn’t a bear or a ferocious lion, but rather, an alien that hunts for sport. It’s a Yautja, or rather, a Predator.
Prey isn’t just an exceptional Predator movie; it’s an exceptional movie, period, one deserving of the attention it’s getting this Emmy season. With Prey firmly in the mix to snag some nominations, Midthunder joined me for a Collider Forces interview to recap her journey as an actor thus far, and to put the spotlight on how Prey could serve as a model for better representation in film and television.
Midthunder’s father is an actor and her mother is a casting director and stunt performer, but they never suggested, “This is what we do, and you could do it, too.” In fact, Midthunder’s parents took the opposite approach to letting their own career paths influence her. Midthunder explained:
“They were very intentional about specifically not talking about it with me. I grew up around it. I would go to my mom’s casting office after school and I would be doing my homework, but really I would be watching the actors and I just thought that it was so interesting. I didn’t think about, ‘Oh, what they do puts my dad where my dad goes to work and then what my dad does is what gives me like, Lizzie McGuire!’ I did not connect those dots, but I did think that it was fascinating to watch people come into a very mundane room and then bring with them this whole story and all this magic, and then when they would leave, it would leave. I thought that was amazing.”
Eventually, Midthunder decided she wanted to create some of that magic herself. While discussing her first steps toward becoming a professional actor, Midthunder made a point to stress that every path in this business is different. Or rather, that everyone has their own unique portal to go through. Here’s how she put it:
“My family and I talk about [how] there’s portals almost. That it’s like the way that people get into whatever they do, especially in the storytelling world, it’s usually so random and so chaotic that it’s almost like a portal that only works once. The way it happens for you is the way it happens for you, and then it closes behind you. It opens for you and it closes for you, and that’s it. So I can’t say, ‘Have parents that are in the film industry that don’t talk to you about it at all and then homeschool for the last few years of high school, move to LA when you’re 17, get a manager, and then hope it works out,’ because that’s what I did and definitely that did work and I think the steps of working really hard and being dedicated and looking for good representation, I do think those are good steps, but at the same time I think it’s really just tenacity. I think it’s really just having good discernment and recognizing who are the good people around you, who are the real people around you, and just being really driven about it because it’s hard.”
For Midthunder, the “good people” included those who’d support the fact that she wasn’t interested in the Disney Channel opportunities that teen actors were often presented with upon moving to LA. Midthunder wanted to follow in Jennifer Lawrence’s footsteps.
“I was 17 when I moved to LA to start acting. I was, I think, the first person in the state of New Mexico to have a legal 18 work status so that I could work and not have child hours because I just knew what I wanted to do, and I felt really sure about that. And so I had a lot of ideas. I think I always had a really clear vision about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be, and so it was pretty immediate that I was like, ‘Listen, I understand that the logical move is to put me on Disney Channel or whatever, but I want Winter’s Bone.’”
Midthunder added, “It’s kind of funny when I look back on it because I feel like I didn’t really have legs to stand on to be counting stuff out so early, but I just really knew what I think was meant for me and what wasn’t.”
One thing Midthunder suspected might not be for her at a point? Indigenous roles. During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Midthunder mentioned, “I have been very intentional about not doing a lot of like Indigenous-specific roles.” Here’s what she said when asked why that was the case and what changed that:
“It was never like, I’m not gonna do these roles. It was always just that I think the bar — I don’t even think the bar was high. I think the bar was just normal, and the content wasn’t really up to standard. I think that’s what it’s about. That goes into the conversation of, what is quality representation? And it’s like, not a lot of what has been out there. [Laughs] It’s not it! And so that’s really what it was for me. I was like, I want to be representing characters that I’m proud of or that I think are interesting or that are fun to play. I think oftentimes when you get a native character in something it’s just one token character who’s there to be either really spiritual or really, really violent. They’re there and they’re gone. And it’s other people who are telling these stories also. It’s very rare to have, up until recently, which is how it should be — now we have native voices telling native stories, and before it wasn’t that case. It was like we were this thing in a display box that people wanted to look at and copy/paste, and we didn’t get to have that same agency over what we were doing, and so it was really just that.”
Prey, on the other hand, made the accurate portrayal of the Comanche culture a top priority. Given the movie’s massive achievements in that respect, I asked Midthunder for one tactic that was used on Prey to achieve that that other productions could easily apply to find similar success. Here’s what she said:
“I think involving the real people. Even this, [director] Dan [Trachtenberg] is obviously not Comanche, but he had Jhane [Myers], we involved the Comanche Nation. The Comanche people did have a voice in this process. And in doing the Comanche language version of the movie, that was with the Comanche Nation, that was with real Comanche language speakers. And even on the movie, we had an internship program for Native people who wanted to be in the film industry who could get their hours working in the unions there. And now there are people who did that program who are in the union now who are working on movies.”
As the focus shifted to Midthunder’s performance as Naru, we discussed the importance of coming to set prepared, but remaining open to new discoveries along the way. Midthunder immediately pinpointed one particular scene that proved pivotal in finding Naru and, in turn, finding the heart of the film overall. Turns out, the scene was cut from the final feature, but by recognizing its power and importance, that moment winds up reverberating throughout the entire film regardless. Midthunder recalled:
“There was a scene that’s not in the movie that Dan and I both really clicked into that was with the little Comanche girl who comes in, and she’s like, ‘Naru’s back! Naru’s back!’ They’re the Crowfoot family. They’re really sweet. Hi, Crowfoots! There’s a scene where Naru’s walking through and that girl is there and she’s trying to string up a small bow. This was before, pre-hunt. And so she stops and I get down with that girl and I’m like, ‘Oh hey, you have to clean this part,’ and I show her and then I have her do it. I’m like, ‘Here, now you try,’ and then she does it and she picks it up, and there’s this little look and she looks so powerful. There’s this little spark between the two of them that I think for Naru affirms, that’s why I have to fight for this. And for her, it’s like she’s just this little powerful thing. Dan came to me after that scene and he was like, ‘Okay, whatever that was,’ and he showed it to me because we had the conversation, ‘Do you want to watch stuff? Do you not?’ And he was like, ‘I think it’s important that you see this one,’ because I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to see it.’ And he was like, ‘You should watch it. Watch it.’ I watched it and it was so special, and he was like, ‘Whatever this is, that’s the movie.’”
Looking for even more from Midthunder on her journey in Hollywood thus far and her experiences working with Dan Trachtenberg and the team on Prey? You can find just that in her full 37-minute interview in the video at the top of this article or in podcast form below:
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