Michael Greyeyes was “low-key terrified" with his Rutherford Falls role because he had never played a "fully empowered Indigenous man" before

Vanity Fair

Although Greyeyes was excited for his role, he admits some trepidation because his Terry Thomas character was something he had considered outside his wheelhouse. “I recognized quite quickly that (co-creator and showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas) and the writers had created a fully empowered Indigenous man,” Greyeyes tells Vanity Fair. “I thought to myself, With Terry, I can’t use some of the old ways of working. I’ve had a wonderful career. I’ve played a lot of broken men, and there are a lot of beautiful textures in those characters. But what was interesting about Terry is that he is not broken. He’s actually whole. I had to work more quickly. And I couldn’t use any of the previous roots that I knew—what is a character’s dysfunction, where’s that from, how does that manifest itself?” Ornelas says she thought of Designing Women’s Julia Sugarbaker in coming up with the Terry Thomas character. She particularly looked at how ensemble shows like Designing Women and A Different World would regularly gave key characters meaty speeches dissecting social and cultural issues. “There would be a dense topic that they would take and analyze with comedy and humor and lightness,” says Ornelas. “I just always loved those moments, and I thought, If you could find a way to do that in the present day, wouldn’t that be so fun?”