When Lily Gladstone got on a Zoom call with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio as they were looking for the right actress to play his character Ernest Burkhart’s onscreen wife Mollie in Killers of the Flower Moon, DiCaprio recalled that they didn’t read any scenes together. Mainly they asked her questions about her origins growing on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana, as they were trying to make their film sympathetic to the Osage tribe whose members were victims of a “Reign of Terror,” killed for their oil rights monies in 1920’s Oklahoma. When they hung up, DiCaprio recalled Scorsese telling producer Rick Yorn, hire her, just hire her now. DiCaprio was shocked, but he also saw they’d found the right actress.
Taking on the breakout role of her career has been a long journey: a glamorous Cannes premiere, then being unable to speak about the film or her work in it when the film hit theaters during the SAG-AFTRA strike. She has since gotten her moment in the sun. Becoming the first Native American actress to win the Golden Globe and get Oscar nominated has meant becoming a de facto spokeswoman for Native Americans and how they were long given short shrift in films, down to having white actors like Rock Hudson be painted red to portray tribe members.
If this has been a weight, Gladstone has gladly carried it with grace and dignity and no bitterness. That she would get Oscar nominated – she’s considered a favorite in the Best Actress category – seemed a given from the moment Scorsese first showed his epic Apple-funded film on the Croisette. Mollie Burkhart, whose weak-willed husband and father of their children is slowly poisoning her at the behest of his greedy uncle William Hale (De Niro), is the conscience of the movie. Her beautiful brown eyes take everything in as she looks at her husband with love and trust, even as her relatives and neighbors die. She seems unable to fathom that Ernest might be complicit in the deaths; until it is finally time for her to seize her moment and save her life.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Paramount Pictures /Courtesy Everett Collection
It is a raw take on a story that was originally going to focus on how Hoover’s FBI formation came out of solving the murders. Instead, the drama became something that made viewers feel complicit and depressed about greed and human nature. The filmmakers tore the whole movie apart to veer from the familiar Western staple “white savior” trope, instead telling a truly original film that serves as a cautionary tale about human nature and what can happen when it is considered acceptable to take from others not in a position to defend themselves.
In a one-on-one interview for Deadline’s Virtual House panel series, Gladstone was asked what the most gratifying part of a nearly year-long effort to promote the film. She said, “The most moving part is that people have connected with the character they way they really should, and the shift in focus and lens from the formation of the FBI, when there were only three scenes of substance between Mollie and Ernest. Bringing Mollie to the heart of this story gave it a beating heart. It gave the audience an access point to a history that is easy if you’re learning about it for the first time, and no connection to this history of colonization that indigenous people live with daily.”
Check out the conversation in the video above.