Lily Gladstone: tio år i indiefilm, sedan Scorsese och ett historiskt Oscar

Photo: Frank Sun / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Född	2 augusti 1986 Kalispell, Montana, United States
Yrke	Skådespelerska
Känd för	Killers of the Flower Moon, First Cow, Certain Women
Priser	Golden Globe · SAG Award · Academy Award · Emmy · Gotham Independent Film Award Outstanding Lead Performance (2022) · Los Angeles Film Critics Association Best Supporting Actress (2016) · Boston Society of Film Critics Best Supporting Actress (2016)

The silence in Certain Women is deliberate and designed. Kelly Reichardt gives the film’s unnamed ranch hand — a woman who drives ninety minutes across Montana at night to sit at the back of an adult education class and watch a teacher who doesn’t know her name — almost no dialogue. What she does instead is exist in close-up, with a precision and fullness that most actors reserve for their biggest scenes. Lily Gladstone was doing this in 2016 in a film that played at a handful of festival screens and earned critical praise that most people never read. The performance ran about three minutes. It was extraordinary. Very few people saw it.

She grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana, where the Siksikaitsitapi — her Piegan Blackfeet heritage on her paternal side — have lived for centuries alongside her Nez Perce ancestry. Her maternal family brought different histories: European, Cajun, a surname traceable to a cousin of Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. That layered inheritance — settler and Indigenous, colonizer surname and colonized homeland — is not something she has treated as a contradiction to resolve. She has described it as the specific thing she carries.

Her father moved the family near Seattle when she was eleven. At the University of Montana she trained in acting and directing, minored in Native American Studies, and encountered Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed — a practice that understands performance not as spectacle but as a tool for communities to examine and change their own conditions. She graduated in 2008 with a BFA and a sense of what performance could be when it took an audience seriously.

The films that followed were not high-profile. Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian in 2012, a Bertrand Tavernier drama with Benicio del Toro set on the Blackfeet Reservation. Walking Out in 2017. Buster’s Mal Heart the same year. Television work across Billions, Room 104, and eventually Reservation Dogs in 2022. Then First Cow with Reichardt again in 2019, which found a small but devoted audience and earned best film awards from the New York Film Critics Circle. Each of these was the kind of work that builds a career invisible to major industry attention but recognizable to anyone paying close attention to American independent cinema. There were people paying attention. Not enough of them.

Then Martin Scorsese chose her for Mollie Kyle Burkhart.

Killers of the Flower Moon is built from the Osage Indian Murders — the systematic killing of Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma, carried out by white settlers seeking control of their oil-rich land, enabled by law enforcement and federal indifference. Mollie Burkhart was a real Osage woman who survived the murders of her mother and sisters while her husband, a white man with Klan connections, was complicit in the killings. The role asked Gladstone to carry the film’s moral weight without the film ever making her its investigator — she is the person the story happened to, holding it from the inside. Her performance is the film’s ethical center: the cost of everything that happens registers on her face in a stillness that communicates more precisely than elaboration could.

The awards recognition that followed was historic by any measure. She became the first Native American to win the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama. The Academy Award nomination made her the first Indigenous person ever nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars. That this had not happened before in nearly a century of Oscar history says something specific about the industry she was now at the center of. She has spoken publicly about advocating on set and in the writing process for Mollie Burkhart to become the film’s genuine point-of-view character rather than a presence in someone else’s investigation — that the version of the film that reached theaters reflects some of that advocacy. Whether it reflects enough is a question Indigenous critics have not uniformly answered, and she has not foreclosed that debate.

After the awards season, she kept moving. Fancy Dance for Apple TV+, which she also produced, tells the story of a Seneca woman searching for her missing sister — a film that addresses the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples crisis directly, in ways that Killers of the Flower Moon could not. Hulu’s crime series Under the Bridge, set in 1990s British Columbia around the murder of a teenage girl by two other teenagers, earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination. The Wedding Banquet, a queer romantic comedy by director Andrew Ahn, premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. She uses she/they pronouns and has spoken about her queer identity and about the Blackfeet language’s lack of gendered pronouns as an expression of a different relationship with gender that she carries into her self-understanding.

Projects confirmed for 2026 and beyond: In Memoriam, a comedy with Sharon Stone; the action thriller Lone Wolf opposite Bryan Cranston; The Memory Police, an adaptation of Yoko Ogawa’s novel with Martin Scorsese as executive producer; and The Thomas Crown Affair, an Amazon MGM reimagining alongside Michael B. Jordan, scheduled for 2027. She serves as mentor in the Lone Peak Filmmaker Fellowship, working specifically with Indigenous filmmakers. The range of genre and scale she is now choosing — queer romantic comedy, action thriller, literary sci-fi, prestige heist — is deliberate. She is using the platform that the industry, belatedly, gave her. The work she was doing before it arrived was not lesser. She was always this good. The camera found enough of the world watching.