GANGLAND | ©2026 Saban Films

The character of Teddy Sharpe in the new feature drama GANGLAND, opening in theatres and on digital July 10, is not Lou Diamond Phillips’s first go-round playing law enforcement on a reservation. Phillips spent six seasons, 2012-2017, on LONGMIRE as Henry Standing Bear, tribal liaison for the sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming.

However, unlike Henry, Teddy is not indigenous. Although he has spent most of his life here, and his wife is a member of the tribe, he is viewed as an outsider on the Thunderstone reservation. As Teddy’s new deputy, fellow outsider Sandra Scala (Dana Namerode), learns, something in Teddy’s past makes him reluctant to arrest people on his beat; he prefers to mediate differences instead. But as a gang war breaks out, Teddy finds himself increasingly backed into a corner by both the criminals and non-reservation county sheriffs.

Phillips, born in Subic Bay in the Philippines, has had a nonstop career in films and television spanning over forty years. He had three breakout roles in movies rapid succession, all as real-life individuals: rocker Richie Valens in 1987’s LA BAMBA, educator Angel Guzman in 1988’s STAND AND DELIVER, and outlaw Chavez y Chavez in 1988’s YOUNG GUNS (reprising the part in 1990’s YOUNG GUNS II).

Since then, Phillips demonstrated his singing skills in his Tony-nominated performance in the 1996 Broadway revival of THE KING AND I. Besides LONGMIRE, Phillips has had series leads on shows including WOLF LAKE, STARGATE UNIVERSE, PRODIGAL SON, and the animated programs ELEANOR OF AVALON and FIREBUDS. He has also directed feature films and television episodes. Additionally, Phillips has written two science-fiction novels in his TINDERBOX universe.

When Phillips gets on a Zoom call to discuss GANGLAND, he explains how he became involved with the film.

“I received a wonderful email from a good friend, Megan Griffiths, who had written and directed THE NIGHT STALKER [the 2016 telefilm in which Phillips portrayed real-life serial killer Richard Ramirez]. We’ve done a number of other projects together since, and she emailed me and said, ‘Listen, I’ve got this dear friend, award-winning director Vincent Grashaw from the festival circuit, and he’s got this script [by Zach Montague, originally titled KEEP QUIET], and you’re his first choice.’

“And so, I was predisposed to like it, because I think Megan has impeccable taste,” which Phillips jokes he believes “because she hired me once. I read the script, absolutely loved it, got on a Zoom with Vincent, we hit it off incredibly.”

This was followed by Grashaw and his fellow producers offering to make Phillips an executive producer, which Phillips calls “very gracious, and allowing me to help shape how the project moved forward.”

Phillips says the first thing he did was “call up my friend Marcus Red Thunder and bring him in as a technical advisor and co-executive producer. Marcus had been my technical advisor on LONGMIRE for six seasons, and I knew that GANGLAND needed his discerning eye, his hardcore cultural accuracy.

“The great thing about Marcus is that he’s often said, ‘Okay, this isn’t a documentary.’ He tends to know what’s going to work for a work of fiction, and yet still be respectful of what the community needs in being represented. So, that was key.”

Other than that, Phillips relates, his executive producer activities were mostly “notes about scripts, and certainly thoughts on casting. I was able to recommend my good friends Irene Bedard and Kimberly Guerrero for roles.”

Phillips is “really happy to have had a hand in creating this. Although I can’t take too much credit. Vincent Grashaw is really the creative force behind all of this, and the guy who physically pulled it together. So, he and our producers, Ran [Namerode] and Angelia [Adzic] and Cole [Payne], were all fantastic.”

Teddy was originally written as Native American, but Phillips felt it would work better if the character was not considered an insider. “That was one of the conversations that we had with Marcus and Vincent – ‘Let’s go ahead and make him who Lou is – [ethnically] ambiguous, an ally, an ambassador.’ I think Marcus had a great point about it – it makes Teddy a perennial outsider. He wants to protect and serve. This is his community. He married into this. But he ain’t blood, and there are those that would push back on that.

GANGLAND movie poster | ©2026 Saban Films

“And so, that brought in an interesting dynamic, especially when he brings in Dana Namerode’s character Sandra, who is also not Native, to police this community, and the responsibility that you have to that, the duty that you have to that.

“And also, without any spoilers, this has had blowback on him before. So, there are a lot of layers going on, and what we wanted to do with this was to create a story that not only was authentic, but had a lot of complexity to it, a lot of nuance.”

For someone who is not himself indigenous, Teddy sometimes refers to members of the community as “Indian,” a term that is considered by some to be offensive when used by non-Native Americans.

Phillips laughs and notes, “Even though Teddy makes fun of [people who use the terms], I say ‘indigenous,’ I say ‘native,’ although a number of people, including Marcus, will say ‘Indian,’ James Whitecloud [who plays Bull] will say ‘Indian’ automatically.

For Phillips, “Even when I’m referring to tribes, I will often refer to them as Nations, because they’re sovereign nations. Most of my friends are not necessarily offended by the term ‘Indian,’ but I lead with ‘indigenous,’ to be quite honest, or ‘First Nations,’ as Canada calls them. I think it’s good to be prudent. At least that way, everybody knows you’re coming from a place of respect.”

GANGLAND’s setting is intentionally ambiguous, Phillips discloses. “Once again, Marcus’s influence, we made Thunderstone a fictional reservation, and we don’t name the tribe, because we didn’t want it to be specific to one community. Gang violence is a problem on a number of reservations throughout the country.

As for where it was filmed, “We shot it in Oklahoma on Cheyenne/Arapahoe land, just outside of Oklahoma City. And so that [provides] veracity. The land itself becomes a character and can’t help but, I think, affect the actors’ performances.”

The temperature definitely had an impact, Phillips adds. “We shot this in January and February, we were out there on the prairie, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain. It was not glamorous,” he laughs. “So, there’s a certain amount of desolation, there’s the chill in the air, there’s this feeling that we’re playing characters who are weathered, very literally, and who have to withstand the forces of nature. So, it really, I think, informed all of the actors.”

Teddy has a secret – just like all the other characters Phillips plays. “You want every character to have a back story, to have their secrets, whether or not those secrets are ever revealed. Meryl Streep said she would have a secret that, whether it applied to the script or not, she would have it with her.

“What’s interesting about GANGLAND, even the title covers a lot of territory, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. And once you get into the movie, you think you know what it’s going to be, and I’ve had other people tell me, it just keeps turning on you, it keeps twisting on you, and it’s thought-provoking, and it’s emotionally effective, because there’s so much going on.

“There are some films that they’ll take a hard left, and all of a sudden, you’re going to go, ‘Wow, I didn’t see that coming.’ But when we take a left in this film, it absolutely underlines a lot of what has happened before, and you get where these characters are coming from and you get where they’re hoping to go to. It is about surviving, it’s about resilience, it’s about healing, and all of that wrapped up in what is ostensibly a gang film. It’s not just a gang film.”

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Article: Exclusive Interview: Lou Diamond Phillips chats about his new crime film GANGLAND

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