Lou Diamond Phillips on Playing a Perennial Outsider in Gangland
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For Lou Diamond Phillips, playing Teddy in Gangland meant resisting easy definitions.
A tribal police officer who married into the community he now works to protect, Teddy occupies a complicated position within it. He is deeply invested in the people and the land around him, but he is also someone who has had to earn their trust. It was a dynamic Phillips immediately connected with through his own experiences navigating an industry that has often tried to neatly categorize him.
“I don’t really fit into that very narrow authentic box that people like to check,” Phillips says. “Hollywood is infamous for really, really wanting to categorize you.”
Phillips has spent much of his career pushing against those categories, and he wanted to give Teddy that same specificity. Rather than using his background to neatly explain who Teddy is, Phillips was interested in the contradictions that come with being deeply committed to a community while never fully belonging to it.
“Let’s not reduce him. Let’s not simplify him and try to explain certain things.”
As an executive producer on the film, Phillips brought Marcus Red Thunder onto the project after previously working with him as a technical adviser on Longmire. Together with director Vincent Grashaw, they developed Teddy as someone who isn’t Native himself, but has become an ally, ambassador and protector within the community.
That position gives Teddy a constant tension between belonging and being on the outside. Having married into the community, he has a personal investment in protecting it, but that doesn’t automatically grant him its trust.
“He is a perennial outsider,” Phillips says, “somebody who has to earn the respect and the trust of the community.”
The physical world surrounding Teddy reinforces that isolation. Filming largely on the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation in Oklahoma meant that Phillips didn’t have to manufacture his character’s relationship with the landscape. Much of what he needed was already around him.
“The beauty of certain locations is that you don’t have to try,” he says. “You just have to exist.”
Phillips has experienced that throughout his career, whether filming Young Guns in Santa Fe or working in the Northwest Territories. With Gangland, he found that the environment naturally became part of Teddy’s physical and emotional presence.
Grashaw builds on that relationship visually, repeatedly framing Teddy’s police car alone against the vast landscape. For Phillips, the image captures both the scale of Teddy’s responsibility and the solitude that comes with it.
“This one lone sentinel, making the rounds and trying to protect such a vast, unwieldy wilderness,” Phillips says. “You come to understand how alone and yet how committed Teddy is.”
That commitment was also key to distinguishing Teddy from the many other law enforcement characters Phillips has played throughout his career. Coming from a theater background, Phillips approaches every role by trying to build a complete person, regardless of how much of that character ultimately makes it onto the screen.
“You don’t just play the generality ever.”
For Teddy, some of the external details came from people Phillips already knew. He based the character’s accent partly on his father’s North Carolina accent, toning it down into what he describes as a flatter Western sound. Teddy’s posture, walk and nearly permanent scowl helped establish the exterior, but Phillips was much more interested in the history underneath them.
“You know that inside and out and carry that with you from the first frame,” he says.
That history is especially visible in the way Teddy approaches his job. He doesn’t treat every situation or person according to the same rigid formula. His decisions are informed by his knowledge of the community, its history and the individual standing in front of him.
“He treats them as individuals and he treats them as human beings,” Phillips says.
That can mean operating within gray areas or recognizing when simply enforcing a rule may create more problems than it solves. Phillips saw Teddy’s flexibility as something developed through years of understanding what his community actually needs.
“He knows what works and he knows what doesn’t work,” he says. “He is trying slowly but surely to heal the community.”
Teddy’s desire to heal it is complicated by the fact that some of its wounds are tied to his own past. His work isn’t simply about maintaining order. It also gives him the chance to intervene when he recognizes someone approaching a turning point he understands from his own life.
That becomes particularly clear in his relationship with Albert. Teddy sees a young man who hasn’t yet reached the point of no return and believes there is still an opportunity for his life to move in another direction.
“There can be a moment where there can be a change, where there can be an epiphany, where he can break the cycle.”
Phillips describes Teddy as essentially “fighting for the soul of Albert,” hoping to offer him an alternative to the gang violence and recruitment Teddy has spent years trying to stop. Teddy’s own imperfect history gives that effort more weight. He knows firsthand that a person’s past doesn’t necessarily determine where they end up.
His relationship with his new colleague Sandra reveals another side of that philosophy. Teddy already knows pieces of her professional history when they begin working together, but he doesn’t assume that a report tells him everything he needs to know about her. Their early interactions become what Phillips describes as a chess match, with Teddy waiting to see how honest she will be when given the opportunity to tell her own story.
Sometimes that means approaching someone with “bluster and bravado.” Other times, Phillips says, Teddy relies on tenderness. With Sandra, what ultimately earns his attention is the compassion he recognizes in the choices she has made.
“She has not lost that compassion or that empathy and has respect for somebody else’s dignity,” Phillips says. “That’s important to Teddy.”
The gradual shift between them is also part of the larger history Phillips felt running underneath the film. Teddy seems to know everyone, their families and the small details of their lives, while casual references suggest relationships that began long before the audience entered the story.
Phillips credits both Grashaw and writer Zach Montague, who had worked as a tribal police officer himself, with creating a world where even minor characters feel as though they have lives beyond the immediate plot.
“They’re not just pieces to move the plot forward. Each one has a point of view. Each one has their own history.”
It’s a quality Phillips compares to the character-driven films of the 1970s that first inspired him to become an actor. Gangland allows those histories to emerge in pieces, trusting the audience to gradually understand what each character is carrying.
For Teddy, some of the most important pieces initially arrive without explanation. Early in the film, he retrieves hidden alcohol and looks through old photographs, offering a glimpse at the guilt he carries before the audience fully understands its source.
Phillips knew those early moments couldn’t contain everything Teddy would eventually reveal. Playing them meant keeping the full history in mind while allowing the audience to discover it at its own pace.
“There are these little breadcrumbs all through the film,” he says. “It requires you as an actor to modulate the performance.”
That restraint became even more important on a production with little time to spare. Gangland was shot in 18 days, with Phillips working for 15 of them, meaning much of that internal work had to be completed before he arrived on set.
“You come ready to play,” he says. “You come ready for take one to be usable.”
The tight schedule didn’t prevent the production from making discoveries along the way. One of Phillips’ favorite examples came when Grashaw encountered a bison herd during a location scout and immediately saw an opportunity for the film.
Phillips came in early to shoot a newly conceived scene with Tommy Schultz before principal photography had officially begun. With only a small crew, they filmed Teddy and the tribal chief sitting together in a truck surrounded by the herd.
The moment ultimately became more than an unexpected addition to the film. Phillips saw the bison and the landscape around them as a reflection of what both Teddy and the community have endured.
“That scene is about redemption. That scene is about survivability. It’s about resilience.”
Those ideas of endurance and redemption are inseparable from the guilt Teddy carries. Other characters can tell him that he isn’t responsible for everything that happened, but Phillips understood that accepting forgiveness is very different from being offered it.
After four decades of acting, he found that accessing those emotions didn’t require inventing them from a distance. Teddy’s circumstances may be very different from his own, but the experience of looking backward and wishing certain choices had been different was something Phillips could understand.
“I’ve made mistakes. I have regrets,” he says. “I wish I had that to do over. I wish I could have done that differently.”
At this point in his career, Phillips sees those accumulated experiences as another tool he can bring to characters like Teddy. The work is less about manufacturing an emotion than being willing to access something real and allow it into the performance.
“So much of acting a character like this is not acting, but being open enough and honest enough to allow that process to come in and to expose yourself, to be vulnerable.”
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