Forrest Goodluck built one of the most distinctive careers in modern Native American cinema before he’d even finished high school. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he landed his breakout role as Hawk in The Revenant at just 16, working opposite Leonardo DiCaprio on one of the decade’s most punishing film shoots. Since then, he’s starred in Indian Horse,
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and Blood Quantum, choosing Indigenous-led storytelling over easy studio paydays. A citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes, he’s also built a quieter career behind the camera as a filmmaker and producer. This guide breaks down his age, family, filmography, and net worth.
Key Takeaways
- Forrest Goodluck was born August 6, 1998, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation), with Navajo heritage through his father.
- He made his film debut at 16 as Hawk in The Revenant (2015), winning a Young Artist Award for the role.
- He’s since built a reputation in Indigenous-led cinema, with standout roles in Indian Horse, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and Blood Quantum.
- Beyond acting, he’s an award-winning short filmmaker and has picked up producing credits as his career has matured.
- Recent and upcoming work includes Lawmen: Bass Reeves, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and the 2025 thriller At the Place of Ghosts.
- Widely cited net worth figures (around $5 million) come from unverified celebrity-finance sites and should be treated as rough estimates, not confirmed figures.
Who Was Forrest Goodluck Before the Red Carpets?
Long before casting directors knew his name, Forrest Goodluck was just a kid in Albuquerque who liked being on stage. He got his first taste of performing in a sixth-grade production of A Charlie Brown Christmas, then kept at it through middle and high school theater. His parents, Laurie and Kevin, raised him with a strong connection to his heritage. Kevin is Navajo, and Laurie’s ancestry includes Navajo, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Tsimshian roots; through his maternal grandmother, Goodluck is a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes based on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.
That heritage wasn’t background noise. It shaped almost every project he’d go on to choose. Even as a young teenager, he was already doing double duty: acting in community productions while also picking up a camera himself. He became an award-winning youth filmmaker, screening short films at festivals including the Seattle International Film Festival, the Taos Shortz Film Festival, and the LA Skins Fest. He also won a youth award from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian tied to the Santa Fe Indian Market.
At 13, he auditioned for a Chris Eyre film called Man Called Buffalo. It never got made, but the audition mattered anyway. It put him in front of casting director Rene Haynes, who’d built a career casting Native actors in projects like Dances with Wolves. That relationship, more than any single role, is what eventually opened the door to Hollywood.
How Does a Teenager Just “Stumble” Into an Iñárritu Movie?
“Stumble” is generous. It undersells how many near-misses came before the big break. Goodluck had already been attached to Jane Got a Gun, a Natalie Portman western, before that role evaporated when the director left the project. For most teenagers, two false starts might be enough to walk away from acting altogether.
Instead, at 16, he auditioned for The Revenant, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s survival epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He landed the role of Hawk, the half-Pawnee son of DiCaprio’s frontiersman character, Hugh Glass. It was his first produced feature — and it happened to be one of the most demanding productions of the decade, working alongside DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, and Will Poulter under a director known for grueling, natural-light-only shoots.
Rene Haynes deserves real credit here. She’d already tried to get Goodluck cast twice before, and her persistence paid off on the third attempt. It’s a useful reminder that breakout roles rarely happen in a single audition; they’re usually the payoff of years of smaller, unglamorous groundwork.
What Was It Like Enduring the “Living Hell” of The Revenant Shoot?
The Revenant isn’t just remembered for winning awards. It’s remembered for how brutal it was to make. Principal photography stretched across nine months, from October 2014 through August 2015, moving between remote locations in Canada and, eventually, Tierra del Fuego in Argentina when the Canadian sets ran out of snow. Iñárritu insisted on shooting only in natural light, which meant the crew often had a narrow window each day to capture usable footage — and lost close to half their working hours just traveling to and from isolated locations.
Crew turnover was constant, with people quitting or getting fired throughout the shoot. The Hollywood Reporter’s now-famous account of the production described the set as “a living hell,” a phrase that stuck because it captured just how far the cast and crew were pushed. For a 16-year-old on his first film set, that environment could have been overwhelming. Instead, Goodluck’s performance as Hawk held up against seasoned co-stars, and it earned him the Best Performance in a Feature Film — Supporting Young Actor award at the 37th Young Artist Awards.
The Revenant went on to gross over $530 million worldwide against a $135 million budget, and its brutal production became almost as much a part of the film’s legend as the story itself. For Goodluck, it was proof that he could hold his own in the highest-pressure corner of the industry — a fact that shaped every choice he made afterward.
Why Was His Pivot to Indie Drama So Critical?
After a blockbuster debut, plenty of young actors chase more blockbusters. Goodluck went the other way, and it turned out to be the smarter long game. In 2017, he starred as Saul Indian Horse in Indian Horse, a drama confronting the legacy of Canada’s residential school system and its devastating effects on Indigenous children. A year later, he took on the role of Adam Red Eagle in The Miseducation of Cameron Post, playing a two-spirit teenager sent to a conversion therapy camp, alongside Chloë Grace Moretz and Sasha Lane.
Neither film had a Revenant-sized budget. Both dealt with weightier, more specific material than most studio scripts would touch — colonial trauma, sexuality, identity — and both let Goodluck build a different kind of résumé than “kid from the Oscar movie.” That pivot mattered because it established him as someone chasing meaningful roles in Indigenous and queer storytelling, not just chasing visibility.
This period also lines up with a broader shift happening across the industry: streaming platforms and indie financiers were suddenly willing to back films by and about communities that studios had long ignored. Goodluck was in the right place, with the right instincts, at exactly the right moment. His choices during these years weren’t the safest career path available, but they were the ones that built genuine credibility with Indigenous filmmakers and audiences.
How Did Blood Quantum Flip the Script on Colonialism?
By 2019, Goodluck had built enough of a track record that Mi’gMaq director Jeff Barnaby cast him as Joseph in Blood Quantum, a zombie horror film that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. The premise flips the genre’s usual rules: a virus turns the dead into flesh-eating zombies, but Indigenous residents of the fictional Red Crow reserve are immune, while white settlers and refugees are not.
It’s not subtle, and it’s not meant to be. The title refers to blood quantum laws — the real legal framework used across the U.S. and Canada to measure someone’s “percentage” of Indigenous ancestry. Barnaby used the zombie genre to invert a familiar colonial narrative, turning immunity into a kind of sovereignty and framing the outside world’s collapse as the direct consequence of centuries of extraction and violence. As Joseph, Goodluck played one of two brothers wrestling with radically different responses to the crisis, anchoring the film’s emotional core alongside Michael Greyeyes and Kiowa Gordon.
Critics responded well. The film picked up ten nominations at the Canadian Screen Awards, and reviewers praised it for rejecting what one critic called horror’s default white gaze in favor of an unapologetically Indigenous lens. For Goodluck, it was another example of a pattern: choosing genre and indie work that let Indigenous creators tell Indigenous stories on their own terms, rather than chasing the biggest paycheck available.
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Why Is He Producing Films Now?
Acting was never the whole picture for Goodluck. He’d been making short films since childhood, and as his acting career matured, that filmmaking instinct started showing up in his professional credits too. Industry databases now list him with producer and director credits alongside his acting work, reflecting years spent learning production from the inside as both a performer and a hands-on creator at festivals like LA Skins Fest.
That move behind the camera tracks with a broader trend among Indigenous performers of his generation: using visibility earned through acting to open doors for control over how Native stories get told, financed, and shaped from the ground up. It’s a slower, harder path than simply taking whatever role comes next, but it’s also the one likelier to leave a lasting mark on the industry rather than just a filmography.
What Is Next for Forrest Goodluck?
Goodluck’s recent slate shows an actor still moving between blockbuster-adjacent projects and smaller, more personal films. He played Billy Crow in the Paramount+ western series Lawmen: Bass Reeves (2023) and took on the role of Manny Rivers in the horror prequel Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023). He also appeared as ecoterrorist Michael in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), a tense thriller about a group of young activists sabotaging an oil pipeline.
More recently, he’s returned to Indigenous-led genre filmmaking with Sk+te’kmujue’katik (also released as At the Place of Ghosts), a supernatural thriller from Two-Spirit L’nu filmmaker Bretten Hannam that shot in Nova Scotia and premiered on the festival circuit in 2025. He also has credits in the 2025 releases Trust and the Gore Verbinski comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.
| Year | Title | Role | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | The Revenant | Hawk | Film |
| 2017 | Indian Horse | Saul Indian Horse | Film |
| 2018 | The Miseducation of Cameron Post | Adam Red Eagle | Film |
| 2019 | Blood Quantum | Joseph | Film |
| 2022 | How to Blow Up a Pipeline | Michael | Film |
| 2023 | Lawmen: Bass Reeves | Billy Crow | TV Series |
| 2023 | Pet Sematary: Bloodlines | Manny Rivers | Film |
| 2025 | Sk+te’kmujue’katik (At the Place of Ghosts) | Mise’l | Film |
Given how consistently he’s alternated between studio genre work and Indigenous-led independent film, it’s a safe bet his next moves will keep following that same rhythm — plus, increasingly, more work on the production side as he builds out his filmmaking career.
Conclusion
Forrest Goodluck turned a childhood spent in school plays and short films into one of the most deliberate careers in Native American cinema. Born in Albuquerque in 1998, he landed his breakout role as Hawk in The Revenant at 16, surviving one of Hollywood’s most grueling shoots and winning a Young Artist Award for it. Rather than chasing bigger blockbusters, he pivoted toward Indigenous-led storytelling in Indian Horse, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and Blood Quantum.
That pattern has continued into recent years, with roles in Lawmen: Bass Reeves, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, and the 2025 thriller At the Place of Ghosts, alongside growing producing credits. A citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes, Goodluck has built a career defined by purpose over payday — and his next move is worth watching.
FAQs
How old is Forrest Goodluck?
He was born August 6, 1998, making him 27 years old as of mid-2026.
What is Forrest Goodluck’s ethnicity?
He’s Native American, a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation), with Navajo heritage through his father.
What was Forrest Goodluck’s first movie?
The Revenant (2015), in which he played Hawk, the son of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character.
Is Forrest Goodluck a director or producer, not just an actor?
Yes. Alongside acting, he’s worked as a short filmmaker since childhood and has picked up producing and directing credits as his career has developed.
What is Forrest Goodluck’s net worth?
Figures circulating online (commonly cited as around $5 million) come from celebrity finance sites that don’t cite verified sources, so they should be treated as rough, unconfirmed estimates rather than facts.
Is Forrest Goodluck married?
No public records indicate he’s married or has children; he keeps his personal life largely private.
