Killers performance: Lily Gladstone on her history-making Best Actress Oscar nomination

UNITED STATES – Lily Gladstone shed a few tears when she heard American actor Jack Quaid read her name in the best actress Oscars category on Jan 23.

“I didn’t expect that I would cry the way that I did,” she said. But it was nothing compared with the reaction of her parents.

“It definitely turned on the waterworks,” said Gladstone, who stars as Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman whose white husband is part of a murderous conspiracy in the Martin Scorsese epic Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023), which is available on Apple TV+.

She was calling from Pawhuska, Oklahoma, shortly after watching the Oscar nominations announcement on FaceTime with her parents.

After all, it is not every day that you are nominated for your first Oscar – or that you become the first Native American to be nominated for a competitive acting Academy Award.

“It’s something that I wasn’t sure I would see in my career, in my lifetime,” said Gladstone, 37, who has Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage. “I hope that it just means that people start caring more and learning more about these histories.”

Gladstone is not the first indigenous artiste up for best actress – Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider, 2002) from New Zealand and Yalitza Aparicio (Roma, 2018) from Mexico were also nominated in the same category – but she is the first from the United States.

Folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie is considered the first indigenous person to win an Oscar (for best song, Up Where We Belong from 1982’s An Officer And A Gentleman), but her heritage has recently been disputed.

And in 2019, Wes Studi, who is Cherokee American, was given an honorary Oscar for “his indelible film portrayals and for his steadfast support of the Native American community”.

Gladstone has had a busy month. On Jan 7, she became the first indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, delivering a powerful speech in which she spoke a few lines in the Blackfeet language.

She also picked up a best actress win from the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as nominations from the Critics Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild.

“I’m hopeful because of the way things are trending now. We’re telling our own stories or we have a really heavy hand in shaping how stories about us are told,” she said.

Killers Of The Flower Moon, based on the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann, was reconceived early on to focus on the relationship between Mollie and her husband Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), who conspires with his uncle (Robert De Niro) to kill her relatives in a bid to seize her family’s oil-rich Oklahoma land.

Since the film was released in October 2023, critics have singled out Gladstone.

She grew up acting in plays staged by a travelling children’s theatre on the Blackfeet reservation in north-western Montana. She landed a breakthrough role in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie, Certain Women, that raised her profile considerably.

But Killers, with its reported US$200 million (S$268 million) budget and A-list cast, vaulted her into hyperspace.

What has it been like to receive such copious recognition from the industry after years of struggling to find parts that weren’t insulting or exploitative?

It is time that Native characters based upon living incredible women like Mollie Kyle be given the heart of these films. Killers was an opportunity to restore a place on-screen for Native women that history has excluded us from. So to have Mollie, her sisters, her mother and her community be characters that, just by being who they are on-screen, are changing people’s stereotypes and contextualising moments in history that maybe make the present make a little bit more sense – it is long overdue.

You spoke a few lines in the language of your people, the Blackfeet tribe, after your historic win at the Golden Globes. When and how did you become interested in studying Blackfeet?

Growing up on my reservation, I picked it up. I am not fluent.

One of the first sentences we learn how to construct is how to introduce yourself to a group of people. You say your Blackfeet name, and then you also tell everybody where you are from, which people you come from, which is what I did at the Globes.

I would not have been up on that stage if it weren’t for how early in my life my community identified my gift and my love of acting. Performing and telling stories has always been synonymous with my name. I have always been encouraged to do this, in whatever form it takes. There were a lot of years when acting was a means of teaching and teaching about our history, specifically, the Native American boarding school experience.

After my speech at the Globes, it was moving to see the response from Blackfeet people on TikTok and Facebook.

One family had recorded their little girl, who is learning Blackfeet along with English, and when she heard me speaking, she started talking back in Blackfeet to the screen, and then when I was done speaking, she went, “Sookaapii”, which means “It’s good”. Like, “That was good.” That just broke my heart wide open.

Though Killers was your breakout role, you have a film, TV and theatre resume that spans more than a decade. Any recommendations for what people should watch you in next?

Definitely stream Reservation Dogs (2021 to 2023) – and not just my episodes. It is an incredible series. Each episode is so full, so funny, so heartbreaking. There is a reason that it’s been named the best show by so many publications.

The Unknown Country (2022) is another one that shows the way the performances of the incredible indigenous actors in Killers have helped shift the paradigm and break stereotypes for people.

And there is also Fancy Dance (2023), which is the absolute best film to watch in tandem with Killers.

It is the same land, the same issues, exactly 100 years later, and how they have manifested into the modern age.

It is an incredible love story between an aunt and her niece and a display of matrilineal resilience, as well as love and survival. NYTIMES