‘Dark Winds’: Titus Welliver on Playing a Big Bad in Season 4 After ‘Bosch’ Run

Dark Winds Season 4 is quickly approaching its finale, but not before delivering a tense back-and-forth conversation between criminal Dominic McNair (Bosch‘s Titus Welliver) and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon).

In an effort to hunt down Irene Vaggan (Franka Potente), Leaphorn met with her boss, the incarcerated McNair, seeking answers about where she might be in hopes of saving Leroy Gorman. The meeting leads to an intense face-off as Leaphorn threatens McNair. Ultimately, Vaggan catches up with Leaphorn, seemingly capturing the Navajo policeman.

Below, Welliver opens up about joining the series as a big bad after his recent run on Bosch, working opposite Zahn McClarnon, and his thoughts on where McNair stands regarding Vaggan’s off-script actions.

How did your role as Dominic McNair come about this season, and what interested you in joining the Dark Winds world in this part that’s a bit of a shakeup from your recent work on Bosch? 

Titus Welliver: I had read the Hillerman books long, long before, and then I was very excited at the prospect of it when it was announced that there was going to be a show, and even more excited when I saw that Zahn was cast as Leaphorn. I went, “Oh my god, that’s lightning in a bottle.” He’s been one of my favorite actors of the past decade, and he’s just insanely gifted. He so fully embodies that character, and so I got the call about the show and talked to John Wirth. It was interesting because the McNair character,  we never see him outside of prison, so it was an interesting task as an actor to play a character who’s incarcerated, but is still the puppet master, and he’s moving all these pieces around.

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You have to transmit the level of peril without doing too much because we don’t really get any general backstory on his relationship with Vaggan and all of that, so it all has to translate in those few scenes, which were a lot of fun to do. Without tons of exposition, it allows the audience to really go, “What did I just see? What just transpired?”  And Franka and I, we were friends. We’d worked together on Titans before, so that was beautiful, because we had the gift of knowing each other and having a comfort [when doing scenes].

Regarding their dynamic, who is the scarier individual: Vaggan or McNair?

I draw the analogy with that relationship in that if you have a vicious dog that you use as a tool, as a weapon, if you don’t dominate and control that weapon, it can turn on you. So I think McNair understands completely her capabilities, but he’s not afraid of her. He’s not even cautious around her. Because she’s such a terminator, you know, how do you depict a sense of power and control over something that’s so malevolent? And that’s also the beauty of her performance, that she’s just a great white shark.

That was sort of our challenge as actors: to try to create that dynamic, because there were moments where she starts to get a little sassy, and he sort of shuts it down, to intimate to the audience what the power dynamic was without weakening her character and without weakening my character. The combination of these two people is really bad news for whoever gets in their way, and so that was a lot of fun to play and to be on the other side of the table because I’m usually the guy who’s doing the questioning.

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During their conversation, Leaphorn threatens McNair that he’s a potential danger to the criminal if he gets out of jail. Does McNair take any concern from that? 

I don’t know that it keeps him up at night, but I certainly, as an actor, wanted to telegraph some sense of concern without it being shown as a kind of weakness. When we were sitting with the director Zahn and I, we were talking, and I remember he said, “What do you think this scene is about?” And I said, “It’s two wolves circling each other.” Everyone has two dogs inside of them, one is a good dog, and one is a bad dog, and the dog that you feed ultimately wins.

It’s not macho posturing,  I think that Leaphorn’s threats and the fact that he has the balls to talk to McNair that way is not lost on McNair. He’s like this guy knows who I am, and he’s just shown me who he is. I think there’s an odd kind of respect that transpires in that moment. It’s a great way to express a kind of indifference and arrogance.

Vaggan captures Joe Leaphorn, acting on her own interests, it seems. Do you think McNair would want to cut ties with Vaggan now that she’s deviating from her assignments? 

I think he would have a very serious conversation with her, which would be don’t operate outside of the agreement. They have a contract, they have an understanding, and I think he’s entrusted her with the task of doing what he wants done, of do what you do, you don’t have to give me the blow-by-blow, but don’t blow it, cause if you blow it, then there’s gonna be a problem. McNair doesn’t go outside of the prison; he’s incarcerated, so there’s so much that he doesn’t see in play, which makes it fun. It’s like a secret between Vaggan and the audience.

Dark Winds, Season 4, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC and AMC+