Lily Gladstone (‘Killers of the Flower Moon’): ‘These stories shape the way the world works’

Christopher Rosen
·7 min read
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If it seems like Lily Gladstone is winning Best Actress prizes for her acclaimed performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon” multiple times per week, that’s because it’s true. Since the New York Film Critics Circle announced Gladstone as the group’s Best Actress prizewinner on November 30, the 37-year-old star has been awarded Best Actress by the National Board of Review, Boston Society of Film Critics, and Chicago Film Critics Association, and earned Best Actress nominations from the Golden Globe Awards and Critics’ Choice Awards. 

“It feels like a lot,” Gladstone tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview when asked about her early success during awards season. “It’s really exciting. It’s been a little bit rapid-fire this last week, so I kind of have been joking that I get this news and I intellectualize it and I know it’s going to be waiting down the hall for me to body slam me when I’m onto the next thing. So yeah, it has been incredible.”

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The story of how Gladstone landed her career-changing role of Mollie Burkhart in Martin Scorsese’s new film has quickly become the stuff of legend. Scorsese and his casting directors, Ellen Lewis and Rene Haynes, cast a wide net to find an actress to play Mollie, but Gladstone was an early contender for the part. “I’ve known Lily since the beginning of her career. I cast her in one of her first films [‘Winter in the Blood’] and she has a quiet dignity. And she doesn’t have to speak. And when I read the script, this is an essence of Mollie,” Haynes previously told Gold Derby. “That is so integral to the story and to the character. And Lily was somebody that immediately came to mind.”

Based on the book by David Grann and co-written by Scorsese and Eric Roth, “Killers of the Flower Moon” broadly focuses on the Osage Indian murders in 1920s Oklahoma, where countless tribal members were killed as part of a conspiracy to steal their headrights. (At the time of the murders, members of the Osage tribe were the richest people per capita in the world due to the oil that was found on their land.) But at the center of the murder plot – which was largely perpetrated by William Hale (Robert De Niro) – is Mollie and her toxic and deadly relationship with Ernest Burkhart, Hale’s dimwitted nephew played by Leonardo DiCaprio. As depicted in the film, Ernest conspired to murder numerous members of Mollie’s family and even actively poisoned Mollie under the guise of providing medicine for her diabetes. Yet even Mollie and Ernest’s granddaughter, Margie Burkhart, has said there was real love between the two that extended beyond the criminal acts.

“It was something that I think the whole time felt a bit like a freefall for both Leo and I,” Gladstone, who is of Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce, and European heritage, and grew up on the reservation of the Blackfeet Nation, says of recreating their complex relationship. “The first thing I did after I saw the film was I texted Leo, ‘OMG we did it.’ Because I mean, we were wondering [if it would work].”

In her research, Gladstone says she found evidence that Ernest did love Mollie, even as he slowly tried to kill her. “One that was glaringly obvious to me that was proof of the love there is that Ernest learned Osage to be able to speak with Mollie on her terms. There were a lot of white people who married Osage during this time that didn’t go to that length,” Gladstone says. “Also, the fact that he had moved back to Osage County after he had gotten out of prison and would still show up at community doings – nobody would talk to him, people knew who he was and ignored him. But he still kept showing up.”

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Gladstone says her chemistry with DiCaprio was rooted in a lot of real stories of relationships from the time, including her grandmother, after whom Gladstone was named. She and Scorsese also leaned on William Wyler’s film “The Heiress,” where Olivia de Havilland played a character who fell for a duplicitous man (Montgomery Clift) who had eyes on her fortune. But one of the tragedies of “Killers of the Flower Moon” that sets the film apart is Mollie’s obvious awareness. She’s smart enough to peg Ernest as a wily, money-hungry figure almost from their first meeting when she calls him “šǫ́mįhkase” or “coyote” – but she still winds up seduced by his seeming harmlessness. It’s why Gladstone has called the film a “trickster narrative” or “trickster noir.”

“The whole analogy of ‘Ernest as coyote’ is that the coyote is very self-serving, hedonistic, pleasure-seeking, and always getting into trouble. He’s basically the fop of a trickster figure… coyote is the funny one,” she says. “So that made Ernest feel not threatening to Mollie right away. It’s like, ‘Oh, I see what you’re doing. You’re after money, I got your number. You know, this is kind of fun. This is kind of a sexy little dynamic.’ In the end, even though coyote never really wins in the story, it doesn’t mean that coyote doesn’t hurt everybody along the way.”

That idea comes full circle in the final meeting between Mollie and Ernest in the back of a courthouse after Ernest has testified against his uncle and admitted to aiding and abetting in the murder plot. When Mollie asks if Ernest has poisoned her, he can’t admit his guilt. 

“What is so lovely about the way Marty shot it, the complicity that Ernest held while also maintaining and trying to maintain both sides of himself, is something that we are all very capable of,” she says. “It’s one reason why trickster stories are cautionary tales because we’re all capable of being that trickster in some way. So looking at it through a lens where the film is indicting itself and this long history of making narrative and entertainment out of histories like this. It’s doing it in a compassionate and self-indicting way, and kind of in a Catholic confessional way, of really what is our original sin here. We are all fallible humans.”

In that final conversation, Mollie again calls out Ernest for being a trickster figure, much as she did when they first met. Only now, the full extent of his ruinous deeds has become clear. “It’s also an indictment of herself,” Gladstone says of Mollie’s realization. “She let herself tangle with this trickster, this cautionary tale she was raised to avoid. That’s the thing about these trickster stories. When you’re raised with them as a kid, you think they’re funny, you think they’re entertainment. But as you grow up, you realize that was a life lesson. These stories actually do shape the way the world works. And they’re sacred in that way. They’re really, really important.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” from Apple Original Films and Paramount is out now.

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