Amber Midthunder

She is gaining a reputation for such roles with films like “The Ice Road” and her latest, “Prey.” She's the rare Native American actress to star in the ...

“It’s a richer, more diverse scene for Indigenous performers,” said Joanna Hearne, a professor at the University of Oklahoma specializing in Native American and global Indigenous film and media studies. (“The metaphors are endless!”) But if she felt any pressure at all, she kept a cool head. “I tried not to think about all that,” she said. “I had a Disney princess tent with an air mattress in the bottom for my eighth birthday,” she recalled. She also starred in and co-produced a bruising indie four-hander about two couples, “The Wheel.” The movie will be streamable not just in its original English, with some Comanche and French, but also in an all-Comanche version, dubbed by the cast members. (Though she didn’t mention the title, it sounded a bit like “ The Misadventures of Psyche & Me.”) “Oftentimes in period pieces we’re boiled down to a hyperspiritualized figure or this violent savage caricature,” she said. We’d like to thank you for reading The Times and encourage you to support journalism like this by becoming a subscriber. “I just feel like an Amber,” she said good-naturedly in an interview last week at a Midtown Manhattan hotel. Doing so will give you access to the work of over 1,700 journalists whose mission is to cover the world and make sure you have accurate and impartial information on the most important topics of the day. The sequence involved the movie’s most physically intensive action, requiring fine-tuned choreography and a rousing finish.