WHEN KALI REIS first sparred Katie Taylor in September 2016, she was a 10-5-1 middleweight who worked in a motorcycle shop.

Seven years later, Reis jumps on a Zoom call from her home in Philadelphia to tell The42 that she intends to fight the winner of Taylor’s undisputed light-welterweight bout with Chantelle Cameron in Dublin and seize back the world-title belts that she vacated for health reasons last year.

The day job has changed a little bit, too.

She is fresh off a fortnight in Calgary, Canada, where she just boxed off her supporting role in the sequel to the critically acclaimed 2017 film Wind River. Prior to that, she had spent seven months in Iceland filming the upcoming fourth season of HBO’s True Detective, in which she will star alongside two-time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster as one of the two titular characters.

Another of her recent projects, Black Flies, premiered at Cannes this week.

Sean Penn. Mike Tyson. Kali Reis. It takes some getting used to.

“It is just weird,” beams Reis, whose TV and movie career began when she both co-wrote and played the lead role in the award-winning 2021 indie movie Catch the Fair One. “I mean, it’s very, very weird. My life has taken such a turn, but all in good ways.

“It’s one thing to try something new and it’s another to get thrown in head-first. A bit like boxing, it’s backs-against-ropes: you’ve gotta learn and you’ve gotta learn quick.

“With True Detective, I had auditioned months before I got the official call, and when I got the call I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, you got the part, you’re gonna star alongside Jodie Foster.’ And again, I’m like, ‘WHAT?’” Reis laughs. “It was so surreal.”

The fourth season of the prestige crime anthology series, entitled ‘Night Country’, takes place in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, where detectives Liz Danvers (Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Reis) are hired to find eight men who vanish while working at a local research centre.

Reis began shooting in Iceland in November of last year, spending the bones of seven months away from her husband Brian as well as friends and family.

“It wasn’t easy,” she says. “I was in a foreign country, in a new industry; we’re working 12- or 18-hour days, working through the night in the middle of the winter. And there’s pressure to get it right, not only as an actor but as a mixed Indigenous woman in a major TV role, representing my community.

“…And then it also just so happens that I’m working alongside Jodie Foster, who is a legend.

“But then, being with Jodie…” Reis says, “she was just amazing. She’s so cool, she’s hilarious, so generous with her time. We’re best of friends now, but working alongside her initially, it’s like you just wanna try boxing and then you get a call to join Mike Tyson’s camp for a heavyweight title fight in 1986!

“I just had to absorb it and learn on the job, which I did. And then, in the middle of all of that, I get the call to tell me that they want to cast me in Wind River; and like, they just wanted to cast me, no audition necessary. Things are just kinda happening.

“But what I’ve been through in boxing, my background, and what I’ve been through in life in general have definitely equipped me with the strength and the wherewithal to navigate my way through this — because it’s not easy.”

Reis descends from the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe and these days puts extraordinary effort into campaigning for Native American rights.

Between shooting the Wind River sequel in Calgary and hopping on a Zoom call with The42, she travelled to Seattle for a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) march.

Reis routinely speaks to young girls in Native communities in a bid to educate them against falling for the traps that every year see thousands of Indigenous American girls and women promised a route off their reservation to greener pastures only to be lost to sex-trafficking rings.

She uses the profile gained from her boxing career, and now as an actor, to raise public awareness of this and other forms of systemic oppression faced by Indigenous American people in the present day.

Reis herself wasn’t raised on “the res’”, instead growing up in “not the greatest neighbourhood, not the worst neighbourhood” of Providence, Rhode Island.

Her mother is half Native American, half-Cape Verdean. Her father was mostly Cape Verdean but also came from Native American ancestry. Kali and her four siblings — all older — were the first generation of the Reis clan whose upbringing was steeped in Native American culture, a conscious decision by their mother to reconnect with the family’s heritage.

“It’s an interesting perspective that I come from, too”, Reis explains, “because when you’re Native American or Indigenous — or ‘Indian’ as they call it here — people assume I grew up on a reservation or I’m full-blood. But that’s not true by any means, especially being from New England.

“I have Irish and English blood in there too because I’m from that first-contact tribe area. We held those people off for four or five hundred years before they headed west!

“Growing up, you’re not native enough for Native people. You’re not black but you look Spanish. You’re the token native kid.

I got picked on, especially going to school and representing my heritage, being so proud and being the only Native kid around. But I also got picked on going to different Native ceremonies because I don’t look like your typical, straight-haired, black-haired native from the southwest, y’know what I mean? I just never felt enough for anyone.

It was a feeling which festered throughout childhood after Reis’ father left the family when she was five, a situation for which she blamed herself until she was old enough to know better.

That sense of disorientation was greatly exacerbated at the age of 12, when Reis was raped on several occasions by a boy from her neighbourhood who she knew and trusted.

Hurt, confused, and unable to share her anguish with anybody, Reis started drinking. She would polish off a bottle of Jack Daniels per day. If it wasn’t readily available, she would steal it. She would occasionally turning up high for basketball training. Anything to feel something else.

“It was a really confusing time with my father gone. Y’know, 12-year-old girls with their mothers — it was just me and my mom in the house at the time. Everybody else had gone to college or whatever.

“Looking back, maybe that’s why I was so… vulnerable to being in the situation that I got put in.

“I was kind of lured into a situation where, maybe if I’d had other influences, I might have been able to see it for what it was. I might have fought my way out of it, or I might not have found myself in the situation in the first place.”

Kali Reis in Catch the Fair One. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Reis wouldn’t wish on anybody what she went through as a child, but she says she also wouldn’t change most of it.

At 36, she likes the person she sees in the mirror. That she has even made it this far is a sort of self-replenishing source of energy.

It was also during the darkest of times when Reis discovered a sliver of light peaking out from behind the door of the Big Six boxing gym in Providence. It changed her life.

The 13-year-old Reis, aware even then that her bloodline was replete with warriors and survivors from the Wampanoag tribe, instantly found that unarmed combat stirred something guttural in her.

“Boxing found me at the perfect time,” she says. “I had anger in me — I mean, obviously.

“I didn’t really have anybody to go to with my issues. That taught me accountability really early on; to be accountable for myself and to really get to know who I am.

“I always say we all have our own medicine, meaning we all have our own things that we’re good at, or that we enjoy doing. You can be good at singing, you can good at making fries at Burger King… Man, if that’s your passion and if that puts out good energy into the world, then do that with passion. And my medicine was fighting: I found I was really good at it.

“And with boxing, I found I was able to incorporate my identity; even later in my career with my walkouts, or fighting on different TV networks and giving voice to different issues that, normally, the public wouldn’t know about.

“As an Indigenous woman, if you’re ‘called to action’ as we say; if there’s a gift that you possess, you give it. So my boxing has become something that’s bigger than myself.

I see some of the people who used to pick on me, or say I was a black girl trying to be Native, and they call me ‘Cuz’ or ‘Fam’ now because their kids see me. There are all kinds of mixed[-race] kids around that get picked on. I’ve gotten suicide letters, I’ve gotten thank-you emails from parents saying, ‘Hey, my kid saw you fight on HBO and you look just like them. They didn’t know that there was someone out there, not on the res’, doing things like you are. So, thank you.’

“I get that from kids everywhere I go: they see somebody who looks like them doing something that… they can be proud of.

“That’s skyrocketed the importance of continuing to do what I do, both with boxing and in film, where indigenous people are underrepresented. But we comin’… We comin’ strong!” Reis smiles. “So, I’ll take the cold days and nights in Iceland, or the stupid days in the hot-ass gym, smelling like God knows what, if it means that it gives somebody inspiration to be proud of who they are.”

Kali Reis at the 2022 Independent Spirit Awards. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Reis began her professional boxing career in 2008, a time in which the last great stars of female fighting — Laila Ali, Christy Martin, Lucia Rijker — had faded away and the Olympians who would later transform the sport were yet to arrive.

She jokes that she often describes herself as “the J. Cole of women’s boxing” because her career has encompassed both the old school and the new school, but she’s still relevant and she’ll still “fuck you up”.

During the old-school days, the talent in her middleweight division was shallow enough that Reis lost five and drew one of her first 13 fights but still challenged for a legitimate world title in Germany in 2015.

The money was dreadful, the television opportunities were virtually non-existent and, for a moment, Reis is unsure why she even persevered as a pro fighter.

“Good Lord… I was a glutton for punishment,” she laughs.

“And until a few years ago, I didn’t know that I was as good as I would become.

“Actually, my husband Brian (Cohen, also Reis’ boxing manager) and I had this conversation a couple of years ago. Maybe it was partly the result of genetic genocide, but it was almost as if I was scared of being good. Like, I was holding myself back. I didn’t know what success was and I didn’t wanna offend anybody with success. I was kind of in the mindset of, ‘I’m supposed to have my head down and not exceed anything.’ But at the same time, deep down, I’m thinking, ‘Nah, this ain’t it,’ know what I mean?

“I didn’t know how, but I always had a sense that boxing was going to culminate in something bigger than I could imagine.”

In September 2016, Reis was training in her native Providence for a rematch of her middleweight-title defeat to Christina Hammer when she was invited to spar with Katie Taylor in nearby Vernon, Connecticut.

Taylor, dethroned as Olympic champion that summer, had linked up with Ross Enamait who years previously had trained Reis’ cousin, former cruiserweight world-title challenger Matt Godfrey.

Reis instantly jumped at the opportunity to spar Taylor where other female boxers in the region apparently shied away.

Katie Taylor. Gary Carr / INPHO Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO

“Katie’s faster than me but she’s also smaller. At the time, I was fighting at 160 still (Taylor was around 135lbs, by comparison), so I was like, ‘They know I’m bigger, right?’

“But then I spar her, and I was so blown away by her skills and her ring IQ. I was like, ‘Oh, this is what they’re doing in the amateurs? Yo, these bitches can fight!’” Reis laughs. “It was one of those things where I got a taste of what was to come in this new era of women’s professional boxing.

“We both had such a good time, and worked really well off each other.

“From there, every time she was in camp — this was when I was still living in Rhode Island — she’d hit me up and I’d be like, ‘Dude, I’m not even fighting yet but if you need someone…’

“It was a kind of thing where we would get each other in shape. Either I would go to her or she would come up to Big Six where I train in Providence, and it would just always be a dope-ass sparring session.

“It’s always been a pleasure, even to this day. I’ve learned so much about myself just sparring with her.”

Reis describes Taylor as an “absolutely wonderful person” who is “incredibly sure of herself but not in an arrogant way”.

“She’s a kind soul, she has a very gentle spirit about her,” Reis says of her longtime sparring partner. “She’s not stand-offish, she’s just very soft.

“She can seem shy and then, as soon as that bell rings, it’s ‘Oh my God, she is not that.’ Not shy. She has this little cocky way about her in the ring.

“Outside of it, we’d joke around, we’d laugh, we’d talk about other fights, we’d talk about everything. She’s just a really lovely, refreshing person to be around.”

Sparring Taylor during the early years of their friendship sharpened Reis’ boxing ability but while the Irish icon began to take names as a pro, the American’s ensuing ascent momentarily ground to a halt in 2017.

One of Reis’ older brothers, Drew, had waged war against brain cancer for more than a decade, twice beating it into remission.

When he was told at one point that he wouldn’t get his motor skills back, he and his sister made a promise to each other that she would one day be able to train him in boxing. It remains a source of great pride to Kali that she and her brother were able to fulfil that promise.

Drew, a musician and rap artist, was living with his sister when the cancer darkened his door for the third time.

“He was like, ‘Dude, I just don’t want to fight anymore,’” Reis recalls. “And it was like… ‘Do what you wanna do, we’re here for you.’ He did good, man. He had fought that thing for 12 years.

“When he passed, that’s the only time ever that I’ve not wanted to box — because that was our thing. He was my biggest fan in boxing. He was my big brother, man.

“I couldn’t go to the gym without bawling because usually, he would be in the gym with me.

“I had to take some time. I was managing a motorcycle store at the time, I had to go on bereavement leave. I had a fiancé, I had a stepdaughter, I had a lot of responsibilities — but I really needed to take care of myself.

“But I also had to be there for my other siblings. It wasn’t just me who lost a brother. We lost a brother. My mother and father lost their son. People lost a friend. A lot of people in the community lost an entertainer that they loved dearly. He brought joy to everybody.”

Reis’ eventual return to the boxing gym was the result of “not being a quitter, number one,” she smiles. “I don’t quit. We don’t quit. We’ll die trying.

“And it was knowing that he just wanted the best for me, and knowing that I wasn’t done in the ring whatsoever.”

Reis boxing in Catch the Fair One. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Reis still talks to her brother every day. She says his passing remains as painful as it did in 2017, but it helps that the good memories grow fonder with time.

“There are still days where I’m just, like, really… distraught about it,” Reis says. “It might be hearing a song, or it might be just, ‘Oh, let me call hi– oh, I can’t call him,’ y’know what I mean?

“But you’ve gotta continue on with that name. I’ve got the same last name as him. People look at me and they see him. So I’m not gonna mope around. What would he do? He’d want us to live the best possible lives. He’d be cussing me out if I was moping around!

“You’ve gotta be nice to yourself too, though, right? You’ve gotta give yourself time to let it out from time to time. Have your pity party for a day — just don’t stay there. Cry, but let’s not make it the habit of a lifetime.”

Reis was still on bereavement leave from work in 2017 when she received an Instagram message request from a stranger, Josef Kubota Wladyka. He asked her if she would be interested in becoming involved with an upcoming film project, the gist of the plot being that a Native American woman voluntarily joins a sex-trafficking ring in order to find her missing younger sister.

Reis was initially bewildered. As it transpired, it had been the manner in which she had articulated her brother’s passing in an interview which convinced the New York-based director that this professional boxer would make for the perfect creative collaborator and movie lead.

Reis’ previous acting credits included solely church plays but she hailed from an artistic family and, to some degree, she felt as though she had been acting since she was 12 years old.

As she always does, she dove into the project head-first.

Hers and Kubota Wladyka’s indie movie, Catch the Fair One, opened to critical acclaim in 2021. It won several festival awards and Reis was nominated for Best Female Lead at the 2022 Independent Spirit Awards.

Reis was also finally beginning to find serious success in the boxing ring after linking up with experienced manager — and now her husband — Brian Cohen.

Having campaigned at middleweight (160lbs) only a few years previously, Reis pared herself down to 140 and beat Canada’s Kandi Wyatt to claim a light-welterweight world title in November 2020.

After a subsequent victory over Australia’s Diana Prazak, she was entered into Eddie Hearn and Matchroom Boxing’s ‘Road to Undisputed’ tournament alongside fellow light-welter beltholders Mary McGee, Jessica Camara and Chantelle Cameron.

The purpose of the tournament was to establish one unequivocal ruler of the light-welterweight division but, by extension, to create a superfight with lightweight equivalent Katie Taylor.

Reis produced a stirring performance to beat Camara in one semi-final in November 2021. Cameron beat McGee in the other. It would be Reis versus Cameron for all the gold, and a lucrative shot at Katie Taylor afterwards.

Until it wasn’t. A health complication which had plagued Reis during recent bouts dictated that she delay the final and, eventually, vacate her titles.

Cameron scooped those belts up, and she will face Taylor in the first undisputed-versus-undisputed clash in modern boxing history next Saturday.

“With my health, it felt like a dice roll where we don’t quite know what’s going on, and not knowing what’s going on is pretty scary,” says Reis.

“Chantelle’s a real one. It didn’t feel right to hold up somebody else’s dream. I feel I did the right thing by letting go of the belts and allowing somebody else to fight for them.”

Reis’ health-enforced ring hiatus at least allowed her to fully immerse herself in her “blessing” of a second career. After an insane seven months on various movie and TV sets in Iceland, Canada and America, she sighs with relief as she realises she can watch Taylor-Cameron with her husband in their home in Philly; she just has to be in LA two days later.

From Reis’ vantage point, the bout is “one of the most equally skilled, back-and-forth ping-pong matches that I’ve seen in quite some time”.

“Katie and Amanda Serrano was good but I think this is going to be both hers and Chantelle’s biggest tests,” she says.

Katie has established herself in deep waters. I know first-hand that she has a second, third, fourth wind and she has a very rare level of willpower. I can recognise it because I have the same thing. Like, ‘Are you willing to die in that ring?’ And it sounds so cliché but I that know she is; I know that look.

“I haven’t had the pleasure of sharing the ring with Chantelle but I’ve spoken with her and we have an amazing amount of respect for each other.

“Chantelle’s face has a tendency to get chopped up a little bit early in the fight but she has proven that she can take serious shots. When she fought Mary McGee — like, Mary McGee can punch holes through brick walls and Chantelle took those shots and kept up her gameplan. But can she keep that pace with Katie Taylor, can she move for that long? Because Katie Taylor is a moving target.

“It also comes down to the corners: how good are your corners at coming up with a gameplan A through F, and ‘F’ is ‘fuck it, let’s fight.’

“Who’s smarter? Whose ring IQ is better? Katie’s. Skill-wise, Katie is better, but not by much.

“If I had to pick or put my money on it, I would say a deciding factor is to look at the opposition Katie has fought versus the opposition that Chantelle has fought.

“I give Katie the slight edge. But I’m just happy that I get to live in an era where we get to see these female fights: big, headline fights. And I’m so happy for Katie that it’s in her home country.”

Taylor and Cameron. Gary Carr / INPHO Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO

Reis insists that she’s far from retired from boxing. She lives in hope that she’ll be medically cleared to compete again, albeit her status remains unchanged for the moment.

Given she didn’t even lose her belts in the ring, her dream scenario would be to try to claim them back — and then some — from the winner of Saturday’s bout.

“Given the chance and given the okay, hell yeah, I’d jump on that!” Reis says.

Y’know, me and Katie would joke about it when I dropped down to 140, I’d say: ‘Hey, we could make a super-fight… But you can come up to 140, I’m not going down to 135!’ We’ve always said, like, ‘Dude, we would make a good-ass fight.’

“So, yeah, why the hell not?”

Such an approach to life has worked out pretty well for Kali Reis over the last few years.