KALI REIS
“Being someone who identifies as Two -Spirit has impacted [me] in so many ways,” says boxer and actor Kali Reis. “I have always known I was ‘different’ in t he way I expressed myself and to whom I expressed it to, but growing up in the household I did made it difficult to comfortably begin to understand myself.” Discovering her true self has helped Reis “create a more diverse range [in] what I do…day to day, fight to fight and job to job.” The former world champion in two weight classes has recently branched out into acting, thanks to her boxing career. “I was approached by director and writer Josef Kubota Wladyka on Instagram about a script he had written [about] the MMIW [Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women] epidemic,” Reis says. “He had also seen that I was using my boxing platform to bring awareness to various Indigenous issues.” The 2021 film, Catch the Fair One, starred Reis in her first acting role, for which she earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination. Reis’s new career has taken off: she’ll appear in the upcoming film Black Flies, starring Sean Penn, and will star alongside Jodie Foster in the fourth season of HBO’s True Detective series. “I’ve definitely gotten thrown head first into the deep end of an [entirely] different world and it was sink or swim,” Reis says of her budding film career. “It has been the greatest holy shit occurrence in my life to date and I cannot wait to see where it takes me.”
