In Wes Studi’s potent and pioneering acting career, he has played vengeful warriors, dying prisoners and impassioned resistance leaders. For three decades, he has arrestingly crafted wide-ranging portraits of the Native American experience. But one thing he had never done in a movie is give someone a kiss.

“I thought it was about time, yeah,” Studi, 74.

In “A Love Song,” a tender indie drama starring another long-pigeonholed character actor, Dale Dickey, Studi is for the first time cast as a romantic co-star. Dickey (“Winter’s Bone,” “Hell or High Water”) plays a woman camping by a mountain lake awaiting the visit of an old flame.

Studi, the Cherokee actor who masterfully played the defiant Huron warrior Magua in Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans” and who got his first big break playing the character credited only as “the toughest Pawnee” in “Dances With Wolves,” hasn’t been limited entirely to what he calls “leather and feathers” roles. But it’s sometimes taken some extra effort. When he heard Mann was making “Heat,” Studi called up the director and got himself a part as a police detective.

But recently, Studi is increasingly getting a chance to play a wider array of characters. Along with Max Walker-Silverman’s “A Love Song,” which opened in theaters Friday, he’s a recurring guest star on Sterlin Harjo’s “Reservation Dogs,” the second season of which debuts Aug. 3 on Hulu.

“Hopefully it has to do with creating a better understanding of Native people by the general public,” Studi said in an interview. “It does still exist, the misconception that we were all killed off and we don’t exist anymore as peoples. That’s essentially what I want to work on, and being a godfather to Native people in the industry.”