Kali Reis, the boxing champion who turned a film about missing women into a second career

Kali Reis

Photo: HBO / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 24, 1986 Providence, Rhode Island
Occupation	Actress and professional boxer
Known for	Mercy, Resident Evil, Asphalt City
Awards	WBC female middleweight world title · WBA, IBO and WBO female light welterweight world titles · Newport Beach Film Festival Jury · North American Indigenous Athletic Hall of Fame · International Women's Boxing Hall of Fame

The International Women’s Boxing Hall of Fame is about to enshrine Kali Reis as a fighter, and the timing has a dry comedy to it. The last time she was paid to throw a punch, she was a unified world champion at light welterweight. Since then she has been an Alaska state trooper working the polar night beside Jodie Foster, a detective in an AI courtroom next to Chris Pratt, and an armed Umbrella enforcer in Zach Cregger‘s Resident Evil, now in cinemas. She never announced a retirement. The ring simply stopped being where the work was.

What ties the two careers together is not athleticism, although casting directors plainly prize hers. It is a cause. Reis came to acting because the filmmaker Josef Kubota Wladyka read about her campaigning for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls movement and asked her to build a film around it with him. She took a story credit on Catch the Fair One and the lead role, playing Kaylee, a former boxer who walks into a trafficking ring to find her missing sister. The fighter and the activist became one character, and the camera found her.

The youngest of five children, Reis was raised by her mother in East Providence, Rhode Island; she had been born in neighboring Providence on August 24, 1986. Her father, Frank Reis, was a musician who at one point played keyboards for Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. She started boxing at 14 at Manfredo’s Gym in Pawtucket, while filling the rest of her school week with volleyball, basketball, softball and the marching band. Later she studied criminology, aiming to become a corrections officer for teenagers, and learned to repair motorcycles on the side.

As an amateur she won the New York Golden Gloves and the Rocky Marciano Championship. The professional years started on a thinner budget: she worked nightclub security to pay for training, and a serious motorcycle crash in 2012 wiped out a season. She came back, and in April 2016, in New Zealand, she outpointed Maricela Cornejo for the vacant WBC middleweight world title.

Two years later she was part of a first of a different kind. When HBO broadcast a women’s bout for the first time, in May 2018, it was Cecilia Brækhus against Reis for the undisputed welterweight crown. Brækhus won on points. Reis dropped to light welterweight and rebuilt: the WBA title in 2020, the IBO belt in 2021 and, in November of that year, the vacant WBO strap on a split decision over Jessica Camara in Manchester, New Hampshire. It was her 19th win in 27 professional fights. It was also her last.

By then Catch the Fair One had already premiered at the Tribeca Festival, in June 2021, and it brought her a jury prize for best actress at the Newport Beach Film Festival and an Independent Spirit nomination for Best Female Lead. A role in Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s paramedic drama Asphalt City, with Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan, followed. In June 2022 HBO named her as Jodie Foster’s co-lead in True Detective: Night Country, Issa López’s season set in a town in Alaska where eight men vanish from a research station. As Evangeline Navarro, a trooper carrying her own ghosts, Reis earned nominations for the Primetime Emmy, the Golden Globe and the Critics’ Choice Award. She won none of them, but her first television job had put her on the same shortlists as veterans of thirty years.

The Emmy nomination was widely reported as the first acting nomination for a Native American woman, and this is where her story stops being simple to tell. Reis describes herself as Cape Verdean and Native American and names the Seaconke Wampanoag as her tribe; her ring name, K.O. Mequinonoag, comes from a name she says her mother, whom she has called the tribe’s medicine woman, gave her. The Seaconke have spent years seeking state recognition in Rhode Island without obtaining it, and the Narragansett Indian Tribe has questioned the group’s legitimacy. The activist organization Tribal Alliance Against Frauds has published a genealogy report saying it traced five generations of her family and found Portuguese and Cape Verdean lines but no Native ancestry. Her manager told Boston Magazine that Reis “has always been very clear about her identity.” The dispute has not touched the record of her advocacy, which came before the fame and is the reason the acting career exists at all.

Her screen work since has moved toward bigger studios and bigger guns. In Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding, released in November 2025, she took a quieter part alongside Josh O’Connor in a drama about a rancher starting over after a wildfire. Mercy, Timur Bekmambetov’s thriller for Amazon MGM, cast her as Jaq Diallo, partner to Chris Pratt’s detective as he argues for his life before an artificial-intelligence judge played by Rebecca Ferguson; it opened in January 2026 and struggled with critics and at the box office. Then came Resident Evil, Cregger’s reboot for Sony, released in the United States on September 18. She plays Maxine, an Umbrella enforcer, in a part that, according to The Hollywood Reporter, was written for a man before she was cast. The film has passed $200 million worldwide.

Reis identifies as two-spirit and is married to Brian Cohen, a retired professional boxer. She has coached young fighters in Rhode Island, and in 2024 the state’s House of Representatives gave her a Community Hero Award for her work on behalf of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The inscription read: “She needed a hero, so she became one.”

Her calendar for the rest of the year belongs to the actress. 12 12 12, an Apple TV heist series with Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, begins on November 13 and runs through Christmas Day. After that comes Wind River: The Next Chapter, Kari Skogland’s sequel to Wind River, set on a reservation where a string of murders has gone unsolved, the same ground her first film stood on. The Hall of Fame will induct the boxer on October 10 in Las Vegas; every round she has left to fight is booked on screen.