My People Are Very Funny: Graham Greene, 1952-2025

There are two Graham Greenes. Yes, the first one is quite important in the history of film; you would be, too, if you’d written the screenplay to The Third Man. However, I have such a great love for the other one. I have since I was a kid and first saw him on Northern Exposure, and one of the reasons Maverick is the only Mel Gibson movie I’ll watch anymore is that he’s such a joy in it. There are plenty of Native American actors that I have known over the course of my life, and even ones I was aware of as a child. Graham Greene is the first one I ever loved.

Greene was Oneida and Canadian, born and bred in Ontario. He started working life as a welder, steelworker, and draftsman. He worked as a sound technician for concerts. And then he started acting. No, he wasn’t—by his own admission—initially terribly great at it, but he worked at it. IMDb lists his debut as being in a Hong Kong action film called Bei Shao Lin, which feels improbable to me; Wikipedia says he started on TV first and wasn’t in a movie for a couple of years, starting with Running Brave—with Robby Benson as a Native American runner.

Greene would slide seamlessly into the Canadian television pipeline. He was delightful as dynamite-happy demolitions expert Edgar K. B. Montrose on The Red Green Show, a character not defined by being First Nations. Just a nutcase. It’s frankly surprising to me that he did two episodes of Murder, She Wrote and never Murdoch Mysteries, and I’m disappointed that he never did Due South. There should have been a role for him there somewhere.

So far, so what I have written about him before. But in the days since I covered him for Celebrating the Living, he has done a couple of new things. Including another “well, that’s almost enough to make me watch the show,” wherein he appeared with Elaine Miles on an episode of The Last of Us. (I’ve seen the clip, and they’re delightful together.) But his performance on Reservation Dogs, while admittedly just one out of any number of really excellent ones on the show, is even by that show’s standards a stand-out role. Wherein he gets to act with his own second cousin once removed, Gary Farmer.

He’s done literally dozens of things in the last eight years, including an all-male version of As You Like It filmed in Death Valley. He’s got eight things listed as upcoming, though some of them are pre-production and will obviously not feature him now. Graham Greene was one of the hardest working actors in the business—despite never having moved to Hollywood. He wasn’t interested in doing it; he could get there with a plane and people knew how to contact him. One wonders how different it might have been if he’d won that Oscar.