Not long before she landed herKillers of the Flower Moonbreakout role, Lily Gladstone was on her way to an altogether different career path.
“I had my credit card out, registering for a data analytics course,” she toldThe Hollywood Reporterahead of the movie’sCannes Film Festival premierein May. An email notification about a meeting request from none other thanMartin Scorseseinterrupted her application for seasonal work at the Department of Agriculture.
Per the outlet, it was because of her award-winning performance in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 filmCertain Womenthat Scorsese contacted Gladstone, 37, about playing a lead character inKillers:Mollie Burkhart (née Kyle), the real-life target of serial killings of members of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma.
“You just wonder if it’s going to be sustainable,” the Native American star said of an acting career. Gladstone has also appeared onReservation Dogs, Room 104andBillions. Her performance in July’s indieThe Unknown Countrywasnominated for a Gotham Awardon Tuesday.
Instead of switching to data analysis and following a desire to study murder hornets as a self-professed “bee nerd” in 2020, asTHRreported, Gladstone joined Scorsese, 80, in the writer-director’s sixth big-screen collaboration withLeonardo DiCaprio.
Lily Gladstone and Martin Scorsese filming “Killers of the Flower Moon”.Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
The wealth generated on the tribal land — which made the Osage people the richest people per capita in the world in the 1920s — “immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting to murder,” per the movie’s official synopsis.
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Lily Gladstone in May 2023.Victor Boyko/Getty
Victor Boyko/Getty
In aKering Women in Motion conversationin Cannes, France in May, Gladstone said theKillerscast and crew were “nervous because we want to make sure we’re doing this story justice… It’s too important not to take it seriously.”
Of starring opposite Oscar-winning legends, she added, “There was no way I was going to let being starstruck get in the way of doing honest work.”
Gladstone admitted toTHRthat her hands trembled in the early days of filming opposite DiCaprio, who she said “was kind of poking my ribs about that for the first few days… But in a very sweet, self-aware, tongue-in-cheek way.”
TheTitanicstar, 48, said Gladstone “became a source of guidance for all of us, Scorsese included, in terms of how we told the story.” He added that she “spent months studying Mollie Burkhart and her family, working extensively to understand the intricacies of this woman, her relationship with Ernest and her legacy within the Osage community.”
Scorsese toldTHRthat Gladstone’sCertain Womenperformance proved “that she trusted in simplicity. She understood her own onscreen presence as an expressive instrument that could speak for itself. That’s quite rare.”
He added of working with her onKillersthat “her silences, as Mollie, were often more powerful than her words.”
Gladstone, who grew up on the Blackfeet Nation reservation in Browning, Montana, revealed that in her childhood she and her father watched Scorsese movies: “My first Scorsese movie wasKundun. My dad lovedKundun.”
Her father, she continued, “always said, ‘It’s OK, honey. They’ll all want to be your friend when you win your Oscar.’”
Killers of the Flower Moonis in theaters now. In hisreview for PEOPLE, Tom Gliatto called the film “the most sinister movie ever made about the West, and probably the most coldly pessimistic portrait of the American character sinceThere Will Be Blood.”
source: people.com
