From Okmulgee to Hollywood: How Will Sampson Opened Doors for Native Actors
Near the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden does something no one around him believes he can do.
He lifts the massive hydrotherapy control panel from the floor, hurls it through a window, and runs into the night.
Will Sampson, 1979. Photo by Roger Klock, Oklahoma Publishing Company Photography Collection, courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society / The Gateway to Oklahoma History.
For Cherokee actor Wes Studi, watching that scene was about more than a character escaping a psychiatric hospital. It was a rare sight in a 1975 movie theater: a Native man at the center of one of the film’s most powerful moments.
Studi later remembered Will Sampson as the actor who “made all the Indians go, wow, at the movie theaters.”
It is easy to understand why.
Native people were still rarely seen in major American films, and when they appeared, they were often flattened into stereotypes or played by non-Native actors. Then there was Will Sampson: six-foot-four, unmistakable, quiet, complicated, and impossible to ignore.
And when audiences first saw him as Chief Bromden, Sampson had never acted in a movie before.
He was already something else.
An artist.
Before Hollywood, There Was the Art
William Sampson was born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, on September 27, 1933, to Wylie and Mabel Lewis Sampson, both Muscogee (Creek). He began drawing and painting young, largely teaching himself, and eventually became known for Western artwork. He also spent years around rodeos, developing into a competitive rider, while taking on other work along the way.
Long before movie audiences knew him as Will Sampson, his family knew him simply as Sonny.
In an oral history recorded by OKPOP, his nephews remembered a man who was constantly drawing. He carried artwork with him, sketched in restaurants and other gathering places, and sometimes traded drawings for meals. Family members even became part of the work.
One of the most personal examples survives in a painting at the family’s church. Sampson needed a reference for the hands of Jesus, so he had his nephew Norman Daniel hold out his hands while he sketched them. Years later, Daniel could still look at the painting and recognize his own hands.
That small family memory tells us something important about Sampson.
Before the movie sets, before the premieres, before Hollywood knew his name, he was already looking closely at the world around him and turning what he saw into art.
His nephew also remembered a piece of advice from “Uncle Sonny” that stayed with him for life:
“If you’re gonna be a ditch digger, be the best ditch digger that you can be.”
It was not advice about fame. It was advice about the work.
The Role That Changed Everything
In the mid-1970s, producers were searching for someone to play Chief Bromden in the film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The search eventually led them to Sampson.
He was not a trained Hollywood actor waiting for his break. He was an Oklahoma artist with deep connections to the rodeo world who suddenly found himself being considered for a major motion picture. According to family recollections, when the opportunity came, Sampson headed west carrying artwork he hoped to sell along the way.
He got the part.
Released in 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became one of the most acclaimed films of its era. Sampson shared the screen with Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and others, but Chief Bromden became one of the film’s unforgettable figures.
For Sampson’s family back home, the experience was almost surreal.
Norman Daniel remembered seeing the movie and thinking, essentially, Uncle Sonny? The man he knew from home, the relative who had taught him about hard work and responsibility, was suddenly enormous on a movie screen.
There was pride in seeing someone they knew up there.
There was also something bigger.
As Joy Harjo recalled in an OKPOP oral history, Native people simply were not often visible in those kinds of prominent places in popular culture. Sampson’s appearance mattered because visibility itself was unusual.
And Sampson did not disappear after one remarkable role.
During a film career lasting only about twelve years, he appeared in movies including The Outlaw Josey Wales, Orca, Fish Hawk, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, and Firewalker, along with numerous television appearances. His performance in Fish Hawk earned him a Genie Award nomination from the Academy of Canadian Cinema.
But his most important contribution may have happened beyond the screen.
Opening the Door Wider
Will Sampson understood that one Native actor succeeding in Hollywood was not enough.
The larger system had to change.
Sampson was among those involved in establishing the American Indian Film Institute in 1979. In 1983, he founded and served on the board of the American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts, an organization designed to help the entertainment industry find Native performers.
That might sound like a small piece of Hollywood infrastructure.
It was not.
Actress Kimberly Norris Guerrero grew up in Idabel, Oklahoma, dreaming of working in television. After college she was trying to find her way into an industry filled with thousands of other hopeful actors when friends invited her to an open house for Sampson’s registry.
She signed up.
Not long afterward, she was called to audition for ABC’s Son of the Morning Star. She got the role, and her career began moving forward.
“That was a legacy that Will Sampson left all of us who were Native actors at that time.”
Think about that for a moment.
Sampson had fought his way into an industry where opportunities for Native performers were scarce, and then helped build something that could send other Native actors into auditions for the very jobs he might have been competing for himself.
Wes Studi saw the significance of that choice.
In his OKPOP oral history, Studi called Sampson “an avatar of things to come,” remembering him as part of a generation that helped Hollywood begin to recognize that Native people could play Native roles themselves. Studi also admired Sampson for reaching back to help other performers enter the industry.
Actor Max Gail, one of Sampson’s longtime friends, remembered the same instinct. Sampson did not limit himself to talking publicly about the problem. Gail recalled that he took practical steps to create opportunities so Native talent could actually be identified, recognized, and hired.
That distinction matters.
Representation was not merely something Sampson wanted to symbolize.
It was something he tried to build.
More Than a Character
Sampson died in 1987 at only fifty-three years old. His screen career had lasted little more than a decade.
Yet the story did not stop with him.
His son Tim Sampson became an actor and later played Chief Bromden himself onstage in the Broadway revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Subsequent generations of the family have continued working across performance, visual art, film, design, dance, and other forms of creative expression.
Set designer Tafv Sampson has spoken about arriving in Oklahoma to work on Reservation Dogs and recognizing the connection between the opportunities available to her generation and the work earlier generations had done.
She remembered growing up in a family that fought against portrayals of Native people as little more than stereotypes or costumes. Working on Reservation Dogs, surrounded by Native writers, actors, artists, craftspeople, and crew members, felt in some ways like experiencing possibilities her father and grandfather had worked toward years earlier.
That is one of the remarkable things about creative legacy.
Sometimes it is a painting.
Sometimes it is a performance preserved on film.
Sometimes it is advice that a nephew remembers decades later.
And sometimes it is a door.
Will Sampson walked through a door that Hollywood had rarely opened to someone like him. Then, instead of simply standing on the other side, he tried to hold it open.
Today, when Native actors, filmmakers, designers, writers, and artists tell their own stories on screens around the world, the distance between Sampson’s era and ours can seem enormous.
It is worth remembering the people who helped make that distance possible.
One of them came from Okmulgee.
His family called him Sonny.
The rest of the world came to know him as Will Sampson.
Editorial Sources
Oklahoma Historical Society, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture: “Sampson, William”
OKPOP Oral Histories: Will Sampson Family (May 28, 2024); Max Gail (June 13, 2024); Wes Studi (December 23, 2022); Kimberly Norris Guerrero (July 6, 2022); Joy Harjo (September 7, 2023); Tafv Sampson (May 8, 2025).
