Q: Why did you feel you had screwed up the audition?

A: There was a lot of pressure. I knew they were looking for a series regular, someone who would do a lot of episodes of “Fargo,” which is a huge TV show. So you get nervous. You don’t have a lot of information on the character. There’s only a few lines. And there’s only a certain way you can deliver those lines. You might forget a line because you didn’t memorize it all. There are all these nerves, walking into an audition. I think I dropped a line and had to start again. And sometimes you only get that one shot, especially on television.

But then again, there’s not really a big pool of Native actors to choose from. It’s not like 20- to 25-year-old white Americans, where you can have hundreds and thousands of actors. With Natives, you’re going to have a choice between maybe 30 people or 50 people — and half of them are in Canada or all over the country.

Q: Did you imagine a back story for Hanzee beyond what was written on the page?

A: Oh yeah, for sure. There wasn’t a lot on the page. I was lucky enough to have grown up in areas like Nebraska and South Dakota and Minnesota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana. I grew up in the ’70s, and I was very familiar with the revitalization of the Native American spirit, like what happened in Wounded Knee in ’73. I know all those people. I know Russell Means. I know Dennis Banks. And I knew John Trudell, who unfortunately passed away [last week]. John Trudell was a poet and activist for the American Indian Movement and he was a friend. I’m very familiar with that period of time and being around those people and being around that culture.

Q: Given the show’s relationship to the Coen brothers’ work, were those films a key text for you, too? There’s so much Anton Chigurh in the way you carry yourself.

A: In the movie “Fargo,” a buddy of mine named Steve Reevis played Shep Proudfoot. He was the guy who worked at the garage and beat Steve Buscemi. Steve [Reevis] and I grew up in the business together in the early ’90s. So I did take a bit from Steve’s performance. And I was aware of how Noah was pulling different aspects from different Coen brothers movies and putting them in the series. But with the Anton Chigurh thing, I didn’t really think about what Javier Bardem did in “No Country for Old Men.” It actually didn’t hit me until after I did the gas station scene. Javier had so much more dialogue. He was telling a story in that scene.