Lily Gladstone is inches away from securing her first Oscar win with her remarkable performance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. With her Oscar nod the actor has already created history by being the first Native American woman ever to be nominated for Best Actress. But landing on the role has a wonderful backstory and it involves Hollywood legend, Scorsese.
Scorsese’s cinematic legacy reflects the prowess and decades of experience under his belt, the director kept refining his unique way of storytelling keeping his signature intact. Just at a glance, a moviegoer would be able to distinguish a narrative Scorsese tells. Killers of the Flower Moon is no exception but rather another finer film of his career.
Lily Gladstone Called Martin Scorsese An Encyclopedic
Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women is one of the few recent Western dramas that will have a profound impact on the viewers. It has almost been eight years since the release of the movie starring Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, and Lily Gladstone, and still the movie has remained on the favorite list of many. Perhaps, Martin Scorsese watched the critically acclaimed film, at least Gladstone would like to think so.
Speaking with Interview about landing on the Killers of the Flower Moon role, the biggest role of her career so far, Gladstone revealed that her performance in Certain Women might have impressed the legendary director. “I think Marty watched Certain Women,” Gladstone told Interview’s Kelly Reichardt.
Scorsese, for Gladstone, an encyclopedia of cinema itself. His love and passion for movies differentiate his unique ability to cast actors as he envisions the roles. “He’s encyclopedic,” the First Cow actor hinted. “He’s the entire culture of film history walking around in one body,” she added, acknowledging the director’s immense cinematic knowledge. Perhaps, the same nature of the director secured Gladstone’s role in the 2023 Western Crime.
Lily Gladstone Revealed Her Preparation For Killers of the Flower Moon Role
Scorsese’s 2023 masterpiece, as claimed by several critics, stars several prominent Hollywood faces including Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Brendan Fraser, and Jesse Plemons alongside Gladstone. The 37-year-old had to act in a self-tape for the director. “Initially, it was a selftape,” she told the Interview. “I had a couple of different people help me,” she added.
“Before the rewrites, I had three pages of some pretty mouthy dialogue. But I was struggling so much with the scenes that, when COVID shut everything down and the project went quiet for a minute, I assumed that I’d blown the audition. About a year later, I got a request to Zoom with Martin Scorsese.”
After the three pages of lengthy dialogues and the Zoom call, “I got new sides sent to me that had beats,” she added. Of course, she had her way to undergo all the creative layers to impress the director with her performance. But at that point, the job was half done.
“The day that I got cast is when I went to the Osage language app and taught myself the orthography as best as I could,” she revealed.
“It’s funny, I didn’t know my grandma spoke Nez Perce [the namesake language of an Indigenous tribe from the Northwest Plateau]. My grandpa being Blackfeet, and then growing up on the Blackfeet Reservation, that was the language I was used to being around and hearing. I can introduce myself, I’ve got a few words and phrases. But Chinook was a completely different set of phonetics.”
Language checked, and after that, Gladstone had all the room to pull off what Scorsese envisioned. Her immaculate performance in the movie secured an Oscar nod for Best Actress.
Killers of the Flower Moon is available to stream on Apple TV+.
