Lily Gladstone knows the exact moment when she lost it at the world premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon at the Cannes Film Festival. She had walked down the most famous red carpet in the world, flanked by Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro, and then, after the screening, received a rapturous standing ovation for her work in the film. As she looked up from her seat in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, she saw Cate Blanchett standing in front of her. That’s the moment the tears started flowing. “I locked eyes with Cate Blanchett, who has long been my queen, my favorite actress, since I was 15 years old. And she was sitting right in front of me,” says Gladstone. “So that’s a little moment that’s in time forever for me.”
The Cannes premiere of Scorsese’s film— in which Gladstone stars as Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman whose friends and family are being mysteriously murdered—signifies a new chapter in Gladstone’s career. The Native American actor has been acting professionally since 2012 and received critical acclaim and an Independent Spirit Award nomination for her role in Kelly Reichardt‘s feature film Certain Women. But in Killers of the Flower Moon, she delivers a serene and confident performance opposite screen icons that’s already earning rave reviews and some early awards buzz.
For Gladstone, it was the feedback from her own community that meant the most that night. She was flooded with supportive messages, from both friends and family in the Blackfeet Nation reservation where she grew up and from other Native people across the country. A day later, she’s still taking it all in. “I’m very much in a state of being in the moment right now,” she says. “But I feel so grateful. I just feel so grateful.”
At the May 20 premiere, Gladstone wore a Valentino cape-style floral print gown, but she says the entire ensemble was centered around her three-tiered earrings by Jamie Okuma, a Native American designer based in Southern California. “She works from her reservation. She makes everything by hand,” says Gladstone. “Her work has been stunning to me for years.”
As we speak the day after her premiere, it’s clear to me how Gladstone carries her community with her all the time, whether that’s with symbolic earrings or other, intangible ways. Raised on the Blackfeet Nation reservation in Montana, Gladstone graduated from the University of Montana where she studied acting and Native American studies.
She landed her first role in the 2012 film Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, which was directed by Arnaud Desplechin, and then played a lovestruck rancher opposite Kristen Stewart in Certain Women. After roles in Reichardt’s First Cow and an appearance on TV series Billions, Gladstone was told that Scorsese wanted to do a Zoom with her.
In the Apple film, based on the nonfiction book by David Grann, Mollie and the rest of her Osage tribe in Oklahoma have become incredibly wealthy due to the oil discovered on their land in the early 20th century. Their wealth has also attracted the attention of white men, many of whom, like Mollie’s husband Ernest (played by DiCaprio), marry Osage women and then stake a claim of oil wealth.
Gladstone took inspiration for Mollie from her own life, even though she and her character are from different times and different tribes. “I was most concerned with imbuing Mollie with my understanding of her through my lens and upbringing,” she says. “But also keeping the space open to really let Osage people direct who she was and how she would conduct herself.” Gladstone’s grandmother and namesake Lily lived around the same time as Mollie, and was a devout Catholic like Mollie. Though Gladstone never met her, she used stories of her grandmother as a source of inspiration. “When I was sharing stories about Grandma Lily with Osage friends, they would open up about stories of people they knew from that generation,” she says. “There were a lot of things that were real similar.”
On set, Gladstone says she may have come off as withdrawn at first, but she admits she was just trying to keep her head on straight. “I always kept an eye on where in proximity to telling the story about Mollie Burkhart, how far away do I need to keep my own ego? Because there is this element of the pop and glamor of being in a film directed by Scorsese starring DiCaprio and DeNiro,” she says, adding at one point that DiCaprio was teasing her about it. “I said, ‘Dude, I can’t think about it. I can’t think about that. I just have to be here as me and what I can do as best as I can.’”
Though Gladstone may have been the sophomore on set, she carried herself with the confidence of a veteran. “She understood her own onscreen presence as an expressive instrument that could speak for itself,” Scorsese has said. Mollie is often quiet, but also carries a twinkle of humor and wit, and a quiet confidence that speaks in every frame. “Marty trusted that in me, saw that I trusted that in myself and he trusted that in me,” she says. “Sometimes it’s kind of hard to trust that people are going to trust you.”
Her most helpful way into getting to know Mollie was getting to know Mollie’s granddaughter, Margie Burkhart, whom she and DiCaprio both met. “She gifted me just this beautiful peyote stitched, very, very small seed bead cross,” she says. “So Margie was gifting me, but in a way it felt like Mollie was gifting my grandma, Lily, in that moment.”
Gladstone keeps the cross on her mantle in her home, next to a picture of her own grandma Lily. “We only put the really beautiful stuff on the mantle,” she says, and then reveals one other item up there: a picture of Scorsese. “Marty’s surrounded by sweet grass, and right underneath the buffalo skull.”