“Killers of the Flower Moon”
When the call went out for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Cara Jade Myers first read for the part of Rita and then for her sister Mollie, the focus of the film. Finally, she auditioned for the third sister, Anna, who is the most independent and the most troubled, her mother’s favorite but also a hard-drinking partier.
“She was almost larger than life in that character, with a bravery and an unpredictable quality,” says Rene Haynes, who was the film’s Indigenous casting director. “She’s also smart and can think on her feet.”
(Haynes says Zoom bombing a meeting with Myers and her manager to tell her she’d landed the role was “one of the most moving moments of my career,” while Myers says she wishes she’d recorded it. “I just started smiling and sobbing — it was probably the most ugly cry.”)
While Myers was raised in Arizona, she is a member of the Kiowa and Wichita tribes, which she says are like sister tribes to the Osage, the tribe that’s the focus of “Killers”; all are based in Oklahoma. Still, she took nothing for granted, putting pressure on herself to really capture the character’s nuance. “The Osage treasure Anna and her sisters and their stories — they are real people,” she says. “I didn’t want her to be a caricature.”
(Working with three “absolute film legends” only doubled her determination not to be “the weakest link.”)
In addition to reading David Grann’s book that Martin Scorsese adapted, she read “A Pipe for February,” a novel telling the story from the perspective of an Osage character (author Charles Red Corn is a member of the Osage nation). Beyond the books and online research, Myers immersed herself in the community.
“They live and breathe their culture and traditions and I would go to their dances and ask questions and they would sit and explain everything to me,” she recalls. They were so incredibly kind and helpful — they wanted their story told, and they wanted it to be accurate.”
But Myers also drew on her own life to capture Anna. Coming from a family where alcoholism, addiction and mental health issues wreaked havoc, she felt an instant connection with this particular sister. “Anna always spoke to me because I can feel like the pain in her,” she says. The unpredictability Haynes saw in her audition and performance comes from what she lived through with her parents. “One moment they’re fine, the next they in the stratosphere. So I made a conscious decision that every time Anna was on screen, I’d show her differently.”
But beyond Anna’s swings, Myers also wanted to ground her. “Her alcoholism didn’t come from being a party girl but from her pain, from the fact that she’s losing her family that she loves so incredibly deeply. I wasn’t playing the alcoholism, I was playing the pain.”
Equally important, however, was that Myers — a relative unknown who had appeared in single episodes of “This Is Us” and “Rutherford Falls” — wanted to play the fullness of Anna, from the sweet and vulnerable scene with her mother to her more rebellious behavior.
“In the past I’ve played more muted characters, but somebody described Anna as a ‘hurricane of chaos,’” she says, adding that as an introvert with social anxiety — “I don’t know what to say, I’m just going to hide in a corner” — she admired Anna. “I loved her brashness and how she just took command of everything. She had so much life and so much to give.”