In what’s not exactly the most shocking piece of casting news of the day, Canadian Salteaux actor Adam Beach, probably the best-known young Native American actor of his generation, has joined the cast of Jon Favreau’s “Cowboys & Aliens.” The actor, best known for his roles as the Navajo code talker in John Woo’s “Windtalkers,” and as Ira Hayes in Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” will play Nat Colorado, the part-Apache right-hand man to Harrison Ford’s semi-villainous Colonel Woodrow Dollarhyde.
Colorado, like most characters in the script, has a big secret, and it’s a pretty meaty part for Beach, whose debut in “Windtalkers” was pretty inauspicious, but he’s grown a great deal since, proving one of the stronger links in the otherwise deathly-dull “Flags of Our Fathers.” He joins an excellent cast including Daniel Craig, Olivia Wilde, Harrison Ford, Sam Rockwell, Noah Ringer, Clancy Brown, Paul Dano and Keith Carradine.
We liked the early draft we read a great deal, even if there were some teething problems that most likely will have been sorted out by now. It seems like the stars could be aligning to make this one a monster hit — the trailer for “Morning Glory” last week showed, for the first time in an age, the first signs of life in Harrison Ford (who has his best part in a quarter century in “Cowboys & Aliens”), while the colossal success of Western video game “Red Dead Redemption” may have younger audiences re-embracing the genre. We’ll see next July. [Variety]