Killers of the Flower Moon star has a lot to carry
At 37, Lily Gladstone has made history. Now, the 2024 Oscar nominee for Killers of the Flower Moon is texting with Emma Stone and reflecting on what it means.
Lily Gladstone, the breakout performer of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, was driving with an old friend when a text pinged from Emma Stone. The Poor Things actress has become “my sister in all this”, Gladstone would later say, this being the award season that is currently in full throttle. They are widely viewed as being in a two-women contest for the Oscar for best actress, which will be presented on March 11 (NZ time). Gladstone’s friend told her, “I don’t understand your life anymore.” Often, Gladstone doesn’t either.
In a matter of months, after more than two decades of acting, she has become a star, a role model, a potential engine of change. It’s a lot for anyone.
At 37, Gladstone has made history, the first Native American to score a best actress Oscar nomination and the first to win a Golden Globe actress award, which she accepted speaking partly in Blackfoot. Gladstone’s father is of Blackfeet and Nez Percé heritage; her mother is white.
“As an indigenous woman, Lily has broken through a wall that has never been broken in this country, certainly not in Hollywood,” said Julie O’Keefe, an Osage who worked as a Killers wardrobe consultant. It was O’Keefe’s first movie job, only to pick up a Netflix series. Gladstone is helping to lift all boats.
Indigenous roles, often played by white performers during the reign of the western, became so rare – less than one-quarter of 1% of all speaking roles in a survey of 1600 movies over 16 years – that Stacy L. Smith of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative named the Killers actor’s achievement “The Lily Gladstone Effect”.
Among the October study’s prescriptions: “nominate Lily Gladstone for all awards”, which has basically happened. “There should be lots of people like Lily,” Smith said.
“Lily is a wonderful artist, and she has a presence and a face made for cinema,” Scorsese wrote in an email. “I would love to work with her again. Actors with that kind of talent are extremely rare.”
What is it like to be in the centre of the awards maelstrom? “It’s wonderful, but it’s a lot to carry,” Gladstone said late last month, over a lunch of salmon, salad and green juice in a splendid hotel owned by co-star Robert De Niro. She appeared remarkably calm, happy even, despite the constant travel, punishing schedule and non-stop press.
She had deglammed between television appearances, in black pants and top, and a bone-white wool coat, suggesting the newly obtained perk of being driven places. Gladstone had removed the substantial jewellery that she favours to promote indigenous artists: “I’m giving my ears a rest.”
Almost every day erupts in another boldfaced moment. She met her acting idol, Cate Blanchett, at Cannes where Gladstone received a standing ovation. She sat between Daniel Day-Lewis (who knew her work in 2022’s The Unknown Country) and Patti Smith at the National Board of Review.
Gladstone won that, too. Also, the New York Film Critics Circle.
Gladstone and Stone are “rooting for each other so much”, she said. “I’m getting all these sweet texts from her. Or we’re needing to vent about stuff. It’s a very sweet friendship.”
There is little normalcy in Gladstone’s current life. She doesn’t really live anywhere anymore, unless you count the award-and-publicity circuit. Suburban Seattle is “where my mail gets delivered”.
She is the rare actress who never decamped permanently to either coast, spending much of her career in Montana, where she was born and raised until age 11 on a Blackfeet reservation and returned for college at the University of Montana. She was wary of a life of constant auditions.
“If I just heard nothing but ‘no’, it might kill my love for this,” she said. “A lot of my professors were flabbergasted that I wasn’t getting cast in shows but, I get it, I’m a hard one to cast.”
Yet Gladstone landed steady work in regional theatre, a stream of acclaimed indie movies and one lauded television series (Reservation Dogs).
Part of this is due to her commitment to a part and project. Kelly Reichardt directed Gladstone in First Cow and Certain Women, the latter central to landing Killers. When Gladstone auditioned for Reichardt’s Certain Women, she “dressed for the part and put her arm in a cast”, the director said.
During filming, Gladstone moved in with the rancher where they were filming outdoor scenes and took to doing the actual chores that her character performed. “She’s a workhorse. She has a great presence. She sticks out,” Reichardt said.
“I was absolutely riveted by Lily in the film [Certain Women] – by her presence, by her trust in quiet and simplicity,” Scorsese noted, “and by her command of her ‘instrument’, as some actors put it. It was like watching one of the great silent actors.”
Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true story of the Osage murdered for their oil head rights in the early 1920s, based on David Grann’s acclaimed book. Gladstone is the movie’s centre and moral compass playing opposite De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio as her love interest, Ernest. She illuminates it.
Praise for her performance as Mollie Kyle Burkhart has been universal. “Played with serene knowingness,” wrote The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday. Gladstone’s life blew up in the best possible way.
For Mollie, Scorsese’s longtime casting director Ellen Lewis and Rene Haynes, who specialises in finding actors for Native American parts, suggested four or five actresses, “but we pretty well knew that Lily was going to get the role”, Lewis said. “There is a gravity and a stillness and an intelligence in her that was so essential for the role of Mollie.”
She believes, for Gladstone, “the opportunities are limitless. I think she’s a great, great actress”.
Indeed, the scripts have flooded in. Gladstone’s signed to star in The Memory Police with a script by her favourite screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The role is not specifically indigenous, but for Gladstone, “any character that I take, whether it’s explicitly Native or not, is going to be Native because that’s who I am”.
Killers of the Flower Moon is available to stream on Apple TV+. The Oscars will be handed out on Monday afternoon (NZ time), with live coverage for Kiwis available via Disney+.