I Want to Believe: What Three Indigenous Actors Could Mean for the X-Files Reboot

When Deadline broke the news on May 11 that Ryan Coogler’s Hulu reboot of The X-Files had filled out its pilot cast, most of the headlines focused on the marquee names. Weapons Oscar winner Amy Madigan got top billing, followed by Steve Buscemi and Ben Foster. Buried in the same list of eight guest stars was a quieter announcement that may end up being the more telling one for longtime viewers. Three of those eight actors are Indigenous: Devery Jacobs (Mohawk), known for Reservation Dogs; Tantoo Cardinal (Métis/Cree) of Dances With Wolves and Killers of the Flower Moon; and Joel D. Montgrand (Cree) of True Detective: Night Country and Avatar: The Last Airbender.

They join previously cast leads Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel, who play the FBI agents assigned to “a long-shuttered division devoted to cases involving unexplained phenomena.” Coogler, fresh off an Oscar for Sinners, is writing and directing the pilot. Jennifer Yale, an alum of Legion and Your Friends & Neighbors, will serve as showrunner. Original X-Files creator Chris Carter is on board as a non-writing executive producer.

The pilot began shooting in Vancouver this month, the same city where the original series filmed its first five seasons. Details are scarce, but what we do know about the pilot is that the parts filled include a Bureau of Indian Affairs officer, a former biker trying to leave gang life behind, and a missing woman whose case appears to center on a young girl. With that in mind, it’s safe to say the story may well wade into the ongoing crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women. Beyond that, we can only guess what roles Jacobs, Cardinal, and Montgrand will take on and what capacity, if any, those roles may play in future episodes, given how Indigenous presences played a crucial role in the OG series.

Native Representation in the OG X-Files

Hollywood is notorious for mining Native stories without hiring Native voices, and The X-Files was no exception. The X-Files was always keen to include Native stories and talent; how successfully it incorporated them, however, is debatable. But still, those episodes stand as small landmarks of progress in Native representation.

“Shapes” (S1:E19) marks the first time The X-Files brought Native stories into its case files. Mulder and Scully head to Browning, Montana, after a local rancher named Jim Parker shoots and kills a Blackfeet man, Joseph Goodensnake, over a land ownership dispute. Parker insists he fired on a beast, not a man. Mulder soon connects the killing to the manitou, a shapeshifter from Indigenous folklore that can pass from host to host through a bite or upon death. The agents arrive in a community that has every reason to distrust them, specifically citing the FBI’s role at Wounded Knee in 1973, which complicates their investigation. Whether the episode actually honors the legend it borrows or merely dresses up a werewolf story and calls it “Native representation” because of their use of the term “manitou” has been debated since it aired. Still, the willingness to put that story combined with hiring Native talent was a bold move for the time. “Shapes” was meant to be a standalone Monster-of-the-Week episode, but instead opened the door for Native presence to be etched into the show’s mythology.

The second season finale, “Anasazi” (S2:E25), was where the show’s wider mythology and interest in Native stories finally collided. Up to this point, the conspiracy had largely been a story of Beltway power and government cover-ups. Carter and David Duchovny changed that with a single plot detail. The leaked Defense Department file at the center of the episode, a digital tape stolen by a hacker called “The Thinker” that lays out decades of alien collusion, is written in Diné. Scully puts the pieces together once she sees the encryption. Mulder spends much of the episode on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, where a teenager has uncovered a boxcar full of human-alien hybrid corpses marked with smallpox vaccination scars. An elder Albert Hosteen, played by the late Floyd Red Crow Westerman, agrees to translate the tape.

The choice of Diné to hold one of the show’s most important secrets is very smart. It’s the language Navajo code talkers used to carry American military secrets through the Pacific theater during World War II, a language the United States government had spent generations trying to beat out of Indigenous children in federal boarding schools. Carter built his conspiracy on top of that history, and the episode lets it speak for itself. By the closing minutes, with the Cigarette Smoking Man torching the boxcar and Mulder presumed dead inside, the Diné are no longer just a cameo in the series, but a permanent, foundational presence.

Season three returned with “The Blessing Way” (S3:E1), which picked up minutes after the boxcar fire and turned the next hour over to Diné ceremony. Mulder, badly burned and unconscious when Hosteen’s family finds him, is carried into a sweat lodge for the four-day healing ceremony the episode borrows its name from. During the ceremony, Mulder slips between worlds and meets the spirits of his father and Deep Throat, both of whom tell him to come back and finish what he started. Hosteen narrates the hour in Diné, opening and closing the episode in an unsubtitled language, a rare, groundbreaking move at the time. Plenty of shows have used Indigenous “ceremony” as a plot point, even cast real Natives. Still, few actually offered an opportunity for an Indigenous elder to guide the audience through it in their own language.

As groundbreaking as the episode was, it is not without criticism. Carter sat in on “real” Diné chants and rituals (still rolling my eyes at how Carter described his “research”) before writing the script after consultants raised concerns about the representation of Diné culture in “Anasazi.” As with most Native representation, it’s one step forward and two steps back. It was progress to include Native languages and cast actual Natives. It was a progress to hire a Diné sandpainter to create the art seen in the show. But where it always falls short is in how our ceremonies and spirituality often get portrayed as hokey mysticism, which was absolutely the case with “The Blessing Way.”

“Paper Clip” (S3:E2) is the payoff and one of the most highly regarded episodes the show ever produced. Mulder and Scully trace the tape’s secrets to a mining facility in West Virginia, where filing cabinets full of smallpox vaccination records connect the alien conspiracy to Operation Paperclip and the Nazi scientists the United States smuggled into the country after the war. When the Cigarette Smoking Man calls Skinner’s bluff about the missing tape, Skinner reveals that Hosteen and 20 other Navajo have memorized its contents and will reveal what they know if Mulder or Scully are harmed. Oral tradition becomes the one force in the conspiracy that the Syndicate can’t destroy and reframes what the show is about and who has protected the Truth long enough for it to be told.

“El Mundo Gira” (S4:E11) sends the show south, into a migrant labor camp in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Two brothers, a chupacabra, a love triangle, and a spreading fungal infection all pile up here. The Spanish-speaking workers read what happens as folklore, while the agents try to explain it as biology. For 1990s network TV, the episode at least tries to give its Latino characters depth, even as the supernatural plot keeps drifting into telenovela territory.

But that good intent is exactly where this episode went wrong. The “telenovela” treatment kept the migrant workers from feeling like real people. The framing meant to honor the community ends up relying on the same racial tropes it tried to move past, which is often the case when representation occurs without fully understanding or including the voices that best shape it.

“The Gift” (S8:E11) is a Monster-of-the-Week story set in the small town of Squamash, Pennsylvania, where the creature at the center is a “soul eater” drawn from Native American folklore. It is the rare case of a folkloric being that isn’t a threat but an uneasy gift, used and abused by a town that never really grasps what it has. The creature heals the sick by swallowing their illness into its own body, growing more grotesque with each cure, while the townspeople treat it as property rather than a being with any claim of its own. It’s an interesting dynamic because it mirrors the way that Indigenous people, our stories and arts, are exploited.

The soul eater is a piece of Native folklore lifted out of its context and dropped into a town with no Native presence in the story at all. This choice and dynamic have been, and continue to be, a particularly nasty form of erasure. Our stories are sacred in many ways because they carry lessons and protocols about when they are told and who can tell them. But time and time again, as with the creature in the show, they are taken, misappropriated, and exploited for the benefit of non-Natives.

“Vienen” (S8:E18) strands Mulder and Doggett on a quarantined Gulf oil rig where the Black Oil has infected the crew, and the sole survivor of the contamination is an indigenous man named Simon de la Cruz. His Huecha heritage is what saves him; rather than being taken over, his body burns the oil out, leaving radiation marks rather than an infection. The episode treats his immunity as the key to the whole crisis.

That setup is the part to dwell on rather than take at face value. Handing the Indigenous character the one thing that can resolve the threat looks like respect. However, it’s an old trope. Native bodies as vessels of hidden knowledge, valued for what they unlock for the protagonists rather than for the people themselves. De la Cruz is immune and then gone, his purpose spent once his biology has made its point.

Taken together, these episodes illustrate a series that desperately wanted include Indigenous stories and people, but not quite succeeding because they kept trying without handing us the pen. The progress is real: from the unsubtitled Diné on network television, to Floyd Red Crow Westerman as the elder holding the conspiracy’s deepest secret, to a sandpainter hired to make the art real, to oral tradition written as the one thing the Syndicate cannot burn. We can’t deny or ignore that progress any more than we can ignore the problems that were also present.

The original series, to its credit, tried and kept trying at a time when no one really cared if Indigenous people were there at all, and certainly would not have noticed our absence in the X-Files World.

Why the Reboot’s Indigenous Cast is a Promising Look at the Future of Representation in The X-Files

Such is the inheritance Coogler is walking into. The casting announcement, read alongside the role descriptions, suggests he is well aware of it.

Tantoo Cardinal is one of the most decorated Indigenous actors working in North America. Her 50-year, 130-credit career runs from Dances With Wolves and Legends of the Fall through Wind River, Falls Around Her, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Marvel’s Echo. You don’t bring Tantoo Cardinal in for a sage-burning cameo. Devery Jacobs spent three seasons on Reservation Dogs as Elora Danan Postoak. Like Cardinal, and for as young as she is, Jacobs has an illustrious career of her own, with 47 acting credits, 6 writing credits, and 5 producing credits to her name. Joel D. Montgrand brought a steady, but smoldering center as Eddie Qavvik to HBO’s True Detective: Night Country. He is also bringing his vast experience to the proverbial X-Files table.

Three actors. Three nations. Three resumes pointing in the same direction, toward a future where Native representation is more than just an afterthought or plot device. The trio is showing up together in the Coogler-directed pilot, alongside a plot that suggests it will be addressing the crisis of Murdered and Missing Indigenous women. The casting of these particular actors further suggests that Coogler knows exactly what he was inheriting from the original show’s attempts at Native representation and is resolved to do better.

The Truth, in the new X-Files, is still out there. But what we do know is that Indigenous casting alone is a promising start on the journey to discovering that Truth.

Ryan Coogler’s X-Files reboot pilot is currently filming in Vancouver through May and June 2026. Hulu has yet to announce a release date.