WHAT LILY DID NEXT
HER PERFORMANCE IN MARTIN SCORSESE’S KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON SAW LI LY GLADSTONE BECOME PART OF A GLOBAL CONVERSATION — AND GOT HER A GROUNDBREAKING OSCAR NOMINATION. AS SHE TELLS US, THOUGH, SHE’S ONLY JUST GETTING STARTED…
WORDS CHRISTINA NEWLAND
Lily Gladstone, photographed exclusively for Empire at the Beverly Hills Women’s Club, Los Angeles, on 13 April 2024.
RAMONA ROSALES
Previous spread: Dress: Gucci; shoes: Christian Louboutin; earrings: Hollie Eagle Speaker-Ware. Left: Dress: Christian Siriano; earrings: Cyanide Syd’s
LILY GLADSTONE HAS BEEN PUTTING HER FEET UP
You’d be forgiven for assuming that Gladstone — the first Native American actress to have been nominated for an Academy Award — has a lot on her plate. And she has, but at home in Seattle, post-Oscars, she’s spent some well-earned time on the sofa, specifically watching The Bear Season 2. She’s not likely to be hanging around watching Carmy in his Chicago kitchen for too long, though.
After her staggering, soulful performance as Mollie Burkhart, the beleaguered woman at the centre of a vast murder plot in Martin Scorsese’s epic drama Killers Of The Flower Moon — and the Oscar nomination to go with it — there are few Hollywood career trajectories more exciting.
Fancy
Dance:
Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) is taken on a journey of discovery by her aunt, Jax (Lily Gladstone).
But Gladstone, an indigenous actor born and raised on a Blackfeet reservation in Montana, hasn’t courted glory so much as built a résumé on integrity and unshowy talent. Her work with the likes of Kelly Reichardt (on Certain Women and First Cow) gives an idea of her sensibility.
Gladstone’s next film stands perfectly in line — and in dialogue — with her tastes and interests. Fancy Dance, a debut indie from Native writer-director Erica Tremblay, follows Gladstone as the down-and-out Jax, as she and her tween niece desperately search for her missing sister. Made in the terrible shadow of the many missing and murdered indigenous women in North America, Fancy Dance is an insightful story of modern reservation life, named for the traditional dance done at tribal-nation meet-ups known as pow-wows. Killers Of The Flower Moon and Fancy Dance, although vastly different in style and scope, offer insight into the marginal histories — and contemporary wounds — of Native American experience.