VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Simon Baker & Hannah Cheesman Discuss Tribeca Film ‘Hey Viktor!,’ Indigenous Humor

Stars Simon Baker and Hannah Cheesman opened up about their new film, Hey Viktor!, which premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in their new uInterivew. 

Hey Viktor!, a meta-comedy from director-star Cody Lightning, revolves around a purported remake of the indigenous classic Smoke Signals.

Baker and Cheesman discussed their characters in the movie with uInterview founder Erik Meers at our offices in Manhattan. 

“I was young Thomas in Smoke Signals in the original. And say 20 years later, I’m back playing older Thomas, someway somehow, but my character you know has sort of left and left the industry, didn’t want anything to do with the industry anymore,” he said. “Then 20 years later Cody comes knocking on my door trying to get me back to do Smoke Signals 2. Hesitant and didn’t know what to do with it, so I decide to come back.”

Cheesman introduced her ambiguously native character. “I’m Kate Colombo. I am the best friend, manager, fluffer, fixer, etc to Cody Lightning…. We met as kids, we grew up together, we were both, you know, native kids. I was half Cherokee. And so that’s sort of the personal journey of my character, her discovery of her lineage.” 

This film makes a lot of references to the original movie, Smoke Signals. Baker noted how “iconic” the movie is for the native community. 

“[Smoke Signals] is not just for indigenous people but for all of cinema because it actually opened up topics that nobody talked about in that time and era,” he said. “So I think we bring that back 25 years later to bring it up again to see you know what our indigenous communities are going through and what kind of dysfunction we have to go through.”

For Cheesman, the experience was different than Baker’s as she was not a part of the original movie. She describes as feeling like “an outsider.” 

“You don’t have to know the original film, you know, and but at the same time it feels like so clearly drawn from the but so uniquely its own thing,” she said.

An essential part of the movie is comedy, and how it expresses important issues to the indigenous community through humor. Cheesman also had to approach this type of humor from an outsider’s perspective.

“It required a lot of asking questions, respect you know trying to figure out where they like that where the sort of humor that is irreverent as hell you know that being invited to walk that line with kind of my own irreverence as well,” she said.

Baker acknowledged how vital this humor is to the movie and to indigenous communities. 

“Bringing up those types of topics and being able to laugh with it, you know, is the biggest part,” he said, “putting it out there for our indigenous community to say hey you know like this stuff is happening but we, you know, let’s laugh at it…. When you come onto any of our reserves or reservations you know that’s what we use to communicate almost is laughter, you know, and laughter in my eyes can heal.”

For Baker, it was a blast from the past. “It’s been 20-some years and now I’m back you know putting my costume back on that I wore as a child, having the same shirt, you know, fry bread power and you know the same suit jacket,” he added.

It was really vital that everyone felt that this was a safe space where new ideas could be exchanged without being nervous about presenting them. Cheesman recalls feeling this type of community with the cast.

“I was really nervous about this one because I pitched this idea and I was like I don’t know if it’s that good, maybe we shouldn’t do it. And then we did it and then like everybody laughing at cut,” she said.