When Kali Reis’ mother gave her the Native name Mequinonoag, meaning ‘many talents,’ she couldn’t have been more accurate. Reis is a world champion boxer who dominated the female light welterweight field, and is now starring in the immensely popular and acclaimed fourth season of True Detective, dubbed Night Country. Before that, however, she co-wrote and starred in her first film, Catch the Fair One (a phrase which means ‘to fight’ but also refers to its own plot) to rave reviews. She is a vocal and inspiring activist fighting for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls movement, something which is crucially related to the plots of both True Detective and Catch the Fair One.

Catch the Fair One holds a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and won the Audience Award at the hallowed Tribeca Film Festival, along with earning an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Actor. Famed critic A.O. Scott of The New York Times writes, “The nexus of racism, patriarchal power, and sexual exploitation gives Catch the Fair One a pulse of righteous anger, and Reis’ charisma — her willingness to show fear as well as resolve — makes Kaylee a magnetic protagonist.” And Reis a magnetic performer. She spoke with MovieWeb about her debut film.

Kali Reis Steps Into the Ring

For her, there’s a lot of similarity between stepping in the ring and stepping in front of the camera:

“There are so many parallels that I can compare boxing to acting to, especially my mentality where I want to do everything to the best of my ability. So you know, I have coaches and, as in boxing, I have a whole corner. It’s my team. Even if I’m the only one in the ring, we have a team, so they see things I can’t see, and they direct me, whereas [it’s the same] with acting, the people behind the camera, the directors, everybody, they see what I don’t see, and it’s kind of almost like a coach in a way.”

“Also, just that work ethic to try to get the best out of myself, and just really being strict and determined, and I’m very disciplined as well. So those parallels that cross over, even down to what managers do and what agents do, it’s very much crisscrossed entertainment,” added Reis. The parallel between acting and boxing aren’t the only things easily crisscrossed. Catch the Fair One is obviously a fictional revenge thriller and is like a world-class light-welterweight fighter itself; it’s a lean, mean, brutal machine about a woman who puts herself in great danger searching for her sister and hunting the sex traffickers who took her.

Though it’s fictional, there are some striking similarities between the film and Reis’ own story, which makes sense considering that she helped develop it with director Josef Kubota Wladyka. Reis’ character is named Kaylee, and is a half-Native, half-Cape Verdean boxer who feels the pain of the Native community and sees so much indifference toward them on the part of the larger society and sociopolitical systems. Kaylee is searching for her missing sister, after years of bereavement and grief that haven’t healed the trauma. When Reis was approached with the story’s idea from the director, her own brother had passed away six months prior. So much of the film seems extremely personal and indeed cathartic.

My brother, it’s five years yesterday that he passed away, and when Joseph met me he had just passed away maybe about six months prior to, so I was going through it. When we shot in 2019, obviously it’s not something that you’ll ever get over, but you can work through it.

“We have choices as actors,” continued Reis. “My choices may be different, but I definitely pulled from [my brother] a lot less than I thought, especially working with [acting coach] Sheila, because there are different choices that you can use in a moment, but you just got to stick to your choices. So, the loss of a sibling is hard to explain. So, I definitely had that familiarity […] but I pull a lot more happiness from him than I do sadness. So I was really surprised after learning what I did, that I was pulling from all different places, and he was almost like the last one that I would pull from because I want to keep those happy memories.”

Acting Boot Camp

It may appear to be a seamless transition in many ways from professional athlete to actor — the rigorous training, discipline, and stage personas that many athletes like John Cena, Dwayne Johnson, and Gina Carano developed in sports certainly assisted their shift to cinema, and Reis is no exception. Nonetheless, it was still an often intense and difficult process to dive into for Catch the Fair One, one she playfully refers to as ‘acting boot camp.’

“We joke [that] he sent me to an acting boot camp, because this was a two-year process with me and him,” explained Reis. “He was showing me some acting things, he was giving me all the knowledge that he knew, and then just kind of prepped me for what it would be like on set and to act with his other actor friends. He linked me up with [someone] who is now still my acting coach, Shiela Gray, and we had one week when we’d work individually for four to six hours, and then I’d go to class for like two hours, and this was like weeks straight.”

So he threw me to the wolves, and I would never have it any other way. And [Sheila] really fine-tuned a lot of things and had me understand it to a very deep level.

Related: Best Indigenous Movies From North America, Ranked

Missing Native Women in Catch the Fair One and True Detective

Being able to portray a Native woman and the Native community, along with shining a light on the community and the tragedies they’ve faced, was an extremely important aspect of the film for Reis. The director had a vision for this woman and her story, but it wasn’t until Kali entered into the picture that the authenticity of experience, perspective, and research could truly develop. Storytelling is, in a sense, part of Reis’ heritage.

“We all have gifts,” explained Reis. “We all have our own medicine, so to speak, in the indigenous world, and it’s very cathartic to have something and a whole nation of people I’d fight for. Then with storytelling and with acting, you know, storytelling is just a natural way of passing down information, how we’ve done that from generation to generation, and telling our stories the way we need to tell them.”

“Just being a mixed Indigenous woman, being Cape Verdean and Wampanoag, and just being an Indigenous person in today’s society where we are the forgotten race, we are the forgotten people, even though we’re the original people of this land. We’re leading in statistics like murder rates, addiction rates, homelessness. The list goes on and on, and that sense of loss and that genetic genocide that’s been passed on from generation to generation is something real that I experienced firsthand.”

With composure and controlled but righteous anger, Reis continued:

I do have family members who have gone missing and turned up murdered. You know, I personally know people who are missing, I know somebody who knows somebody, you know, and our Native community is so tight, close-knit. We as Native people know our Native problem, we call it Indian country, because it’s like a whole different other world.

“So it was definitely a cathartic process going through this entire journey and telling the story, because I do have personal experience,” continued Reis. “In my travels to different communities and reservations, hearing their stories and then listening to mine, it was very close and personal, but it was something, again, that is our story to tell.” She concluded:

“I knew that it was important to get the information out there, because [if] one white girl goes missing in the U.S., it’s plastered all over CNN, but this happens every day to Native women, not just young girls, older women, younger girls, older men, young boys, it happens to our people. And this is something that happens every day. It’s still happening. So we’re not going to get over it. Because things like this still happen, and they’re still happening now.”

How Far Would You Go to Save Someone?

IFC Films

Catch the Fair One is an often brutal revenge thriller that sees Kaylee infiltrating a prostitution ring, torturing and interrogating sex traffickers, and hunting down the people in charge in order to get to her sister and her truth. The film exposes these real-world issues from a much-needed perspective, made all the more genuine from the experiences, research, and knowledge of Reis and the people involved.

Its exposition, though, is less subdued or subtle than films which may tackle similar themes; no, Catch the Fair One is often a furious cry of indignation, from one “forgotten people” to those who are in charge, or at least those complacent enough to not affect change. Reis is proud of the way the film turned out and, if anything, thinks it wasn’t shocking or angry enough, considering the state of things:

“I heard somebody say at a film festival, “it’s time for us to stop being sad and start being angry,” because we have got justified anger. And actually, you know, in and being a collaborative partner with Joseph and creating this story, I think we didn’t go dark enough. This is the reality of it, and even my mother, God bless her, she’s a medicine woman of our tribe, probably the gentlest person. Her name is ‘Gentle Rain,’ but she said, “this isn’t dark enough,” because it’s just an interpretive story in something like a genre film and a thriller.”

But it tells a story and just starts asking questions. That’s it — bring the awareness and ask the question. So you know, we’ve toyed with the fact that it wasn’t dark enough, and I even told Joseph this, because he was getting nervous. I’m like, “Nah, bro. This is not even dark enough. Trust me.

“I loved Joseph to death, because he knew this story wasn’t his story to tell, but he wanted to [help] tell it, so I’m just having the blessing to be part of how the story is going to get told,” confessed Reis. “I think we played it safe, but you know, there were a couple of times that you could question her character, like, is she really doing this?”

But think about it if you had a little young sister who got caught up in this. How far would you go?

Watch Catch the Fair One