Sivan Alyra Rose Doesn't Want To Be A Role Model — But She Does Want To Inspire You

“Every time I think about Hollywood, I think about New York, and all of the grand stuff I’ve done. It’s glamorous and glitzy and it’s fame and opulent,” Sivan Alyra Rose explains to MTV News over a recent breakfast. She wears a tourist tee shirt over her dress; today is the last day of her press run for Chambers, and she’s tired yet happy. “And then, If I sit down and it’s quiet, I think about my grandma, my mom. I can visualize my residence on the Rez, I can visualize the hill I stay at, I can visualize the road it takes to drive up there, and I’m like, that’s my reality.”


“I saw my face on a bus yesterday,” she adds. “It was very surreal.”


The actor has reason to be contemplative. On April 26, Netflix premiered Chambers, a 10-episode horror with Rose in the center of the intrigue. She stars as Sasha, a teenager navigating how to survive with her uncle, get through high school, and balance her relationship and companions, as soon as her heart suddenly helps prevent and she’s rushed into transplant surgery. The ensuing story isn't about her recovery in the long-established sense; alternatively, she is thrust into the whiter, more affluent world of the girl whose death allowed for her organ donation, and simultaneously realizes that, at some point between her cardiac arrest and her recovery, a demon has planted itself indoor her body. (Rose, yet, is adamant about the fact that while several folks are inherently scared of major surgery, the point of the show isn't to exploit the experience of getting an organ transplant, or prey on people’s feelings about such heavy procedures.)


Chambers is a slow burn, which Rose likens more to a 10-hour movie you could watch in installments than a true TV format. As a Native actor anchoring a show, Rose understands she’s a groundbreaker. She does not wish to be seen as a role model — “I’m 19. I mention fuck a lot. I like dark, scary things,” she notes — however she hopes that other people visualize her as an inspiration “to pursue whichever the fuck they want. Whichever it is they wanna be.”


Rose grew up on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, near Phoenix, Arizona; in high school, the Apache-Latinx teen trained to be a medical assistant. “I had dreams of being a doctor before I had dreams of anything in the creative field because creativity scares parents,” she says. Her first brush with acting came at 16, once an agent saw her modeling at the Santa Fe Indian Market, an annual Indigenous style show. Yet immediately after taping a couple of auditions that ultimately went nowhere, she put acting on hold. “It was just like, the shit outdoors don’t feel real. The shit on the Rez feels real,” she remembers now.


She moved to Santa Fe to attend college at the Institute of American Indian Arts, yet couldn’t afford to stay; it was at that point that she and her boyfriend determined to move to Los Angeles in search of an adventure. There, she reconnected with the casting agent from the style show, who led her to first a student film called Running Shadow and then to Chambers. (“I was like, ‘What? You’re gonna give me a Netflix audition? Do you believe in me that much?’” she remembers.) Working on the show alongside Tony Goldwyn and Rose’s longtime idol Uma Thurman felt like “actor bootcamp,” she adds, yet in the ideal way. “It was just like, yo, you are up here with us getting your work done, we’re gonna help you get your work done. And we did.”


That Chambers is framed as a horror feels fitting to her, not least of all as the show touches on the generational traumas of displacement, appropriation, and more. (“If we’re gonna bring such a scary topic to the table, @we could as well ensure everyone’s scared anyway,” she points out.) It aims to be a story about possession, which helped Rose feel right at house. “I’ve habitually been a big horror fan,” she explains. “That world brought me into the reality of my own dark traumas and embracing that dark side of me.” To achieve that, the show uses forced perspective shots and also a long tension-build, a creative process Rose calls “hell” and “emotionally demanding,” although ultimately worth the task to avoid using CGI in place of IRL fear.


One thing the show certainly didn’t wish to disaster with, yet, was making sure its Native representation was cooperative, not exploitive. Moreover to casting Marcus Lavoi, a citizen of the White Earth Country, and Griffin Powell-Arcand, who is Cree, as Sasha’s uncle and boyfriend, respectively, Rose remembers that the show hired Native peoples to work on every level, from production assistants and grips to the writer’s room. Though Sasha doesn’t have several ties to her Diné heritage, she learns from her uncle, Big Frank, and her boyfriend, TJ; that it was not up to Rose to educate non-Native people while in filming was a relief.


“I didn’t have to be the one to save grace, there were protections all of the way from the starting. It took a lot off me,” she says. “Because all I had to worry about was Sasha being the ideal she may be.” She also hired other Native peoples as members of her team, and wants it to be clear that she’s not down to be anyone’s diversity allowance. “I’m not anyone’s token Native. I don’t aspire to be here alone,” she stresses.


If Hollywood listens, she won’t be. In January, the actor Yalitza Aparicio Martínez made history because the initial Indigenous Mexican woman to be nominated for a Oscar right after starring in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and landing on the cover of Vogue México, among other milestones. And while Netflix hasn’t indicated whether Chambers will nab a second season, Rose hopes her presence on the service can help move the needle in an even more inclusive direction and hopefully open doors for her to play an even wider swath of characters in the future.


“I hope to be a chameleon. Like, the girl next door, Elle Woods, an alien from another planet,” she starts. Sasha, she notes, felt special to her as the character broke free from stereotypes placed upon Native peoples that often work to keep them down.


In other words, Sasha served as a reflection point for Rose, also. “You don’t visualize yourself up until you visualize yourself,” she adds simply. And right now that Hollywood has found, she’s not letting go of their attention anytime soon.