Lily Gladstone: “I liked that I wasn’t given a lead role where I was playing a ‘model minority'.” Photo / Thea Traff, The New York Times
The first Native American actress to win a Golden Globe in Killers of the Flower Moon talks about why her new film, Fancy Dance, is personal.
Four years ago Lily Gladstone applied for a job tracking dangerous hornets for the US Department of Agriculture. The actress had been in a few successful films, including Certain Women with Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart, but acting work had dried up, so she thought she’d try something different. Then Martin Scorsese called. He cast her in Killers of the Flower Moon, alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro — and she hasn’t looked back. Her poised performance as the Osage tribeswoman Mollie earned her a Golden Globe for best actress and an Oscar nomination, the first for a Native American woman in a leading role.
Gladstone, 37, smiles proudly as she talks about it. The highlight was when her tribe, the Blackfeet Nation, based in Montana, held Lily Gladstone Day to celebrate her Oscar nomination. There are videos online of her receiving a special headdress — never mind Academy awards, this is one of the highest Blackfeet honours. “One of the most moving things was getting to meet these kids that I had seen making TikToks cheering me on all through awards season,” she says. “I’d look at their little faces every time I needed a pick-me-up, listening to them tell me to try hard. I’ve wanted to step back from acting at points because I felt like it wasn’t serving anybody, not even me, but [the tribe] supported me.”
The actress is distantly related to the British prime minister William Gladstone. Her tribe has its own language and in 2020 about 35,000 people in the US said they had Blackfeet ancestry. But Native American land and sovereignty came under threat during Donald Trump’s presidency and some of this ongoing tension is reflected in her new film, Fancy Dance. The director is a fellow Native American, Erica Tremblay.
She is in Cannes for its premiere, wearing enormous earrings in the shape of blue Matisse-style cutouts. Pulling off a curl of croissant, Gladstone tells me about the character she plays, Jax, who is from the Seneca-Cayuga tribe, living in Oklahoma. When her sister goes missing and the police are more interested in finding a white fisherman’s stolen truck, Jax turns detective, taking her 13-year-old niece with her (it’s more of a kidnap as the police have said Jax’s previous criminal record means she can’t have custody of her niece).
There are shades of Thelma & Louise and Paper Moon as the duo go on a road trip with the police in hot pursuit. Gladstone likes that it “touches on a lot of things that Native film-makers feel responsibility to include” — chiefly the higher rates of murder and abuse among Native American women — “but is also a tight, fast-paced story with comedy, and a love story between aunt and niece”.
Jax is a flawed character. She’s loving and generous but she also steals, lies, drinks too much and has one-night stands with people she shouldn’t. “I liked that I wasn’t being given a lead in a film where I was playing a model minority. I got to be imperfect and show it’s not only model minorities that deserve our compassion and protection,” Gladstone says. While she is proud to be the first Native American woman to be nominated for prestigious acting awards, it has come with pressure.
In contrast to Jax, Mollie, her character in Killers of the Flower Moon, is an exemplary citizen whose only obvious weakness is a sweet tooth. Gladstone seems to imply that Fancy Dance is more accurate. “A lot of the most prominent cultural leaders in our community come from backgrounds that were very difficult,” she says. “They went through a period where they lived on the fringes and at some point made a choice to change, be it to sober up or settle down. I love that we catch Jax in that transitional phase where circumstances don’t allow her to fully walk away from her old life, because it sucked her sister in.”
Fancy Dance struggled to find a distributor because Hollywood had no blueprint for films about Native American people. “Then Killers of the Flower Moon came out and suddenly audiences had an appetite for this kind of story, so it landed,” Gladstone says.
She worked with the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center on the film. It’s a database of missing indigenous people in the country that was set up by volunteers because the FBI didn’t have one. “There was not even a list of the names of people that needed to be investigated,” Gladstone states in disbelief.
She gives a leaden sigh as she tells me about the several missing women she has known. One is the actress Misty Upham, who was in August: Osage County with Meryl Streep. In 2014 she was found dead in a ravine in Washington, with her skull and ribs broken. She was 32.
Gladstone was teaching at Red Eagle Soaring, the Native American theatre group where Upham also worked, when she disappeared. Staff formed a search party for her, because the police were not looking. Friends eventually found her after 11 days.
“It was a low priority for the police to look for her,” Gladstone says. “There was a short window of time where there could have been intervention that saved her life and that didn’t happen because the police didn’t take it seriously.”
There’s another girl, whom Gladstone mentored. “She was one of those girls you were just looking forward to seeing what they would do with their life,” she says. “Sensitive, confident around adults, good with younger kids. Her death hit hard. I don’t know an indigenous person who doesn’t have a connection to a missing indigenous woman — or man. Most recently there was a man who was about to graduate and was found with his braids cut off, which is a particularly violent thing.”
Fancy Dance touches on anti-Native American feeling among Trump supporters. The Trump administration transferred sacred Native American land to mining companies without the consent of the people who lived there and Gladstone mentions attacks on tribal communities going on in Oklahoma, where the film takes place. In the film we see “Make America Great Again” scrawled on the wall of the toilet of a bar where Native American people go, and someone in a T-shirt that reads “Make America Native Again”.
“A lot of the rights we have [as indigenous communities] are very hard earned and our inherent sovereignty is something the right, especially the Maga right, is starting to see as a threat,” she says. “Tribal sovereignty is part of everything in the United States.” And ironically, it’s something that both the right and the Native American community place a large value on.
Gladstone’s childhood in the tribe in Montana was very rural. They were often snowed in so watched a lot of films. And she was close to all the tribal elders, who told her stories.
Her parents are the reason she didn’t give up on acting. Her father “has constantly hung the word ‘Oscar’ in my ear since I was about six” and her mother, who taught at a community college, advised Gladstone to study something she enjoyed, not what she thought would “be a safe bet”. “She was not interested in what would bring me financial security; she wanted me to be happy. I wouldn’t have made it so far if I hadn’t been given the support I had.”
Her next projects include a Charlie Kaufman film and a television series with Riley Keough. The hornet-tracking job will have to wait.
Fancy Dance is available to stream on Apple TV+ from June 29.
Written by: Susannah Butter
© The Times of London
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