Killers Of The Flower Moon's Lily Gladstone On Scorsese, Stardom And Starting Again

This article was published in December 2023 prior to Lily Gladstone's Best Actress Oscar nomination

When veteran filmmaker Martin Scorsese wanted to cast the pivotal female lead in his new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, it was during lockdown, so his introduction to actress Lily Gladstone was on a humble Zoom call. Scorsese came away transfixed, referring to her ‘integrity’ and ‘intelligence’ even through the less-than-ideal medium of communication.

Gladstone, now 37, had previously garnered critical attention for her role in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women. Born and raised on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana, she first read David Grann's book, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is based on a true story, knowing that she 'was probably going to be in the casting pool’ for the film. In Scorsese's adaptation, she portrays Mollie Burkhart, an oil-rich Osage woman of the 1920s who suffers near-unthinkable tragedy and loss. Her white husband Ernest, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and a cabal of violent collaborators decide to slowly kill her family members to gain control of her ‘head rights’ - or oil wealth.

The actor alongside co-star Leonardo Dicaprio and Cate Blanchett

Although she didn’t come from the Osage tribe, Gladstone grew up knowing much of the story from her father. ‘I was a huge fan of Maria Tallchief, America's first prima ballerina. She was Osage, and from Fairfax, Oklahoma,’ she says. Studying ballet as a girl, she had to be driven two hours every weekend from her reservation to Kallichef, Montana, and once told her father she wished they had a ballet school in their hometown - like Maria Tallchief had.

‘My dad told me it's because Osages had money to have a ballet school because of their oil wealth. He told me a story that the first generation of Osages who had this wealth would buy a Rolls Royce, run out of gas and then go to buy another car. And the salesmen encouraged that, instead of telling them to fill up the tank. That story, I think, had been passed around in Indian country for a long time. And then he said something about Osage being killed for their oil wealth.’

As Mollie is slowly poisoned by her seemingly loving husband, she is alternately in denial and suspicious of his motives, knowing from the start that he is, as she calls him, ‘a coyote’. Gladstone was crucial to the story’s development when it came to interpreting and reflecting indigenous culture. ‘Early on, my Osage language coach told me stories, and some of them were Osage trickster stories. The Blackfeet have them too, though it's not a coyote - we have a different trickster figure. But the coyote trickster is very self-serving and hedonistic. He never really wins in the end,’ she says. ‘That helped me understand the relationship between the tricky sort of dynamic that doesn't necessarily translate cleanly [from Osage to English].’

The cast of Killers of the Flower Moon at The Gotham Awards 2023

Since we’ve spoken, Gladstone has been feted with Best Actress awards at the Los Angeles and New York Film Critics Associations. And this week, she was nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Globes. It’s believed she will also scoop a nod at the Academy Awards; many believe she’s the frontrunner to win, too. But Gladstone is far more outward-looking about it. ‘As a part of a whole filmmaking community that’s rising together, one thing that’s encouraging to me is that a lot of people whose introduction to this history is through this film, are really leaning into wanting more of the Native perspective. I hope that everyone is booked and blessed now,’ she says. All of this to say, 2023 has been quite the year for Gladstone.

But Scorsese’s death-haunted historical epic isn’t the only film she’s been in in the past year: she’s had three other films released, including the hotly-tipped Sundance debut by Erica Tremblay, Fancy Dance, about a Native woman in a frantic search for her missing sister. The film received strong reviews but has not been offered distribution; Gladstone is hopeful it will, or risk proving a point about the sort of stories that Hollywood is willing to tell.

Lily Gladstone alongside Carey Mulligan, Fantasia Barrino and Billie Eilish

‘I didn't move to LA or New York after college to try to pursue acting because I’m not an easy casting choice for a lot of things. It's something I love to do, but I wouldn't have the easiest time of it if I pursued it traditionally,’ she says. ‘And some of that is to do with the roles that are available, and the way that people want to see where Native women belong in society and in stories’.

In a recent Hollywood Reporter interview, Gladstone mentioned she’d been registering for a data analytics course before being offered the role in Killers of the Flower Moon. She points out that this wasn’t quite as dramatic of a career shift as the media made it out to be. ‘It was about wanting to do something that had a bigger purpose while waiting for something to come along. A lot of actors go through seasons where you’re just ready to commit yourself to something else because you're tired of the feast and famine. But I wanted to make a life shift where I could still accommodate films when they came along,' she says. 'My good friend and frequent collaborator Erica Tremblay was writing Fancy Dance that summer, and I knew that she was working on it. But I also knew that films that I seem to be able to fit into don't come by that often. And when they do, they're independent. So they're not bread and butter.’

The actor alongside other Honourees at the ELLE US 2023 Women In Hollywood Celebration

With all the current awards attention, Gladstone is now thoughtfully sharing her spotlight with the causes closest to her heart. She has joined forces with her co-star and fellow philanthropist DiCaprio to garner attention and support for the NIWRC (National Indigenous Women’s Resource Centre) to raise awareness of the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women in North America. ‘Ultimately, the most insidious and effective tactic of colonialism is to strip power away from women. In indigenous cultures, women really are the backbone of our whole societies. Our role is a sacred thing,’ she says.

In Scorsese’s film, Gladstone gives a performance of astonishing power. As the moral centre of an otherwise skewed, casually evil constellation of white men, her character Mollie’s conviction, strength, and pain are unforgettable. That we have only begun to see what Lily Gladstone is capable of seems evident; that what she has already achieved is monumental even moreso.

Killers of the Flower Moon is available to stream via Apple TV