Lily Gladstone: ‘We are done with being told our stories won’t resonate. That’s been proven wrong so often’

We’re accustomed to seeing runners-up putting on a brave face at the Academy Awards. Remember when a crestfallen Michael Keaton folded a piece of paper – his speech, presumably – and put it in his pocket after Eddie Redmayne was instead called to the stage, for The Theory of Everything? Or when Samuel L Jackson muttered “sh**” as Martin Landau won best supporting actor, for Ed Wood?

It’s three months since Lily Gladstone, the first Native American to be nominated for the best actress Oscar, lost out to Emma Stone. But the actor, who won the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards ahead of Stone, doesn’t seem too bothered by the upset.

“I just want to be part of this moment,” she says.

Right now that moment includes Under the Bridge, a new crime series written around Gladstone’s investigating police officer, based on the true-life murder of a Canadian teen, Reena Virk; and Fancy Dance, a nail-biting road movie that premiered at Sundance last year and is about to land on Apple TV+. The film pivots around a particularly pressing issue for the Native American community: the number of missing and murdered indigenous women. In 2020 alone, according to FBI figures, there were 5,295 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls.

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“Erica Tremblay, the director, had written with me in mind,” says Gladstone, who lived on a Blackfeet Nation reservation in Montana as a girl. “The film grew from our desire to work together and her wanting to put me in a leading role in a feature that occupied this queer, Native space. I was unbelievably hooked and elated when I saw the first draught. I felt like I read it in 15 minutes, even though I know it was an hour. I never told Erica this – I didn’t want to scare her – but I was afraid I wasn’t up to it.”

Fancy Dance follows two women living on Oklahoma’s Seneca-Cayuga reservation. Gladstone plays Jax, whose sister has disappeared and is therefore caring for her teenage niece. A heavy drinker, an occasional shoplifter and a queer patron of the local strip club, Jax can’t rouse the authorities to take an interest in her missing sibling. But child-protection services are quick to swoop against her custody of Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson). The pair go on the lam, hoping to find Roki’s mother in time for the girl’s ceremonial dance at an upcoming powwow. Tense final scenes play out against a dance to honour missing and murdered indigenous women at the First Americans Museum, in Oklahoma City.

“Women’s fancy dance arose from a Ponca woman getting frustrated and wanting to break out of women’s traditional dancing,” says Gladstone, who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, in keeping with the ungendered pronouns of her tribe. “This woman wanted to dance the way the men did. So she grabbed a scarf and started doing fancy footwork. That evolved into the fancy shawl dance you see in the movie, during which you’re trying to emulate a butterfly. It’s the most balletic of the powwow dances. Knowing that Jax’s dance is a woman picking up a man’s job felt like the ultimate indigenous embrace of femininity, in the western sense of the word. She occupies a masculine space, but she’s a matriarch in the moment.”

In this androgynous spirit, Gladstone looked to male cousins to help realise Jax, a complex character in a drama that skilfully negotiates contemporary hardships and community empowerment.

“My cousin Will has a chequered past and an amazing ability to turn his life around,” Gladstone says. “He’s a leader in the community and one of the strongest people I know. Like Jax, he turns to traditional medicines, makes sure the language is being taught, and does the footwork for finding our missing relatives. My cousin Chet and I were both raised on the res together, out on the land with our dads. Just having the long braid Chet’s got was a little thing that helped me find that character.”

Quick-witted, articulate and stately, Gladstone is both of Blackfeet and Nez Percé heritage and a first cousin four times removed of William Ewart Gladstone, who was prime minister of Britain in the late 19th century; her paternal great-great-grandfather was Red Crow, the Kainai Nation chief. (On a recent visit to the Ifta awards, she impressed the red carpet with her knowledge of the Choctaw efforts for famine-ravaged Ireland in 1847.)

Gladstone learned Osage for her role as Mollie Burkhart, the besieged heroine at the centre of a genocidal plot in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. For Fancy Dance she learned Cayuga, a language that’s estimated to have fewer than 20 remaining first-language speakers.

“It was such a different process than for learning Osage,” says the actor. “I had several months of language lessons within an entire department for Killers of the Flower Moon. Fancy Dance was made for a fraction of the budget. We had two weeks and maybe four sessions with a language teacher who teaches Seneca Cayuga to a group of kids using an immersive Montessori approach. Isabel and I were so committed to making sure we didn’t make those remaining speakers cringe. The best compliment we got was when the elders, who speak the language fluently, were able to watch without trying to read the subtitles!”

Gladstone fell in love with cinema after seeing The Return of the Jedi as a five-year-old. “I wanted to be an Ewok, so badly,” she says. “Maybe it’s that age-old story of indigenous resistance: the protectors of the forest keeping their land. But as I grew older I found I wasn’t the only Native kid who loved Ewoks.”

Her early ambitions were encouraged by her parents, particularly her dad, who started implanting “earworms about being a movie star and Oscar-winner” in her early childhood. “When I could first conceptualise what acting was, it’s because you comfort yourself or your parents comfort you when one of your favourite characters gets shot or killed,” Gladstone says. “And they’re, like, ‘No, honey: it’s just an actor. It’s an actor.’ Somehow I got it into my head: ‘Okay, I want to be in that story.’”

When she was 11 her family moved to Washington State; as a teenager Gladstone enrolled in Stone Soup, an educational theatre company in Seattle, and appeared in student films. She returned to Montana for university. “I always was so homesick,” she told the Seattle Times about spending her teenage years in the city. “I was born and raised on my reservation, in my mountains, on my plains. That’s still where I feel the most full.”

Gladstone’s earliest professional work typically involved community projects, therapy for survivors of domestic violence, and giving free acting classes for Native American women.

Her stealthily impressive career, which includes roles in Arnaud Desplechin’s 2013 Palme d’Or contender Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian and the TV series Billions and Reservation Dogs, has made her a regular collaborator with the directors Alex and Andrew Smith, Morrissa Maltz and Kelly Reichardt. Scorsese saw her in Reichardt’s Certain Women. She was his first and only choice for Killers of the Flower Moon. “I couldn’t take my eyes off of her,” he said.

Gladstone was considering quitting acting before the director called.

“Marty is such an encyclopedia, so it feels like he is an actor’s director,” she says. “He leaves so much for the actor. He’s completely consumed by his shot list, with other films he’s referencing. He’s always concerned with the arc of the whole film. He believes in his actors to show him what a scene is about and then you work together.”

Her professional rise heralds a new age for indigenous actors and representation. Twelve months after Fancy Dance’s premiere at Sundance, seven indigenous projects screened at this year’s festival. It’s a relief, the actor says, to move away from the dichotomy of “bloodthirsty savage and noble savage”.

“Stories like Fancy Dance and Reservation Dogs confirm what we’ve always known,” she says. “After these years of auditioning for roles that are not created by us but set out to accomplish a certain image or trope, we are done with being told our stories are too esoteric or won’t resonate with a broader audience. That’s been proven wrong so often.

“Film-making has a lot more flavour than it had when John Ford’s westerns were largely shaping people’s perspectives of Native Americans. We want more nuanced stories and other perspectives. It feels like we are coming to a golden age of storytelling.”

Fancy Dance, she has said, “is the absolute best film to watch in tandem with Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s the same land, the same issues, exactly 100 years later, and how they’ve manifested into the modern age”.

Whatever about Gladstone being passed over at the Oscars, the Blackfeet Nation honoured her last year by declaring Lily Gladstone Day and honouring the star with a headdress.

“There are about 100 women who have one of these today,” she says. “The headdress has a life of its own. It comes to you either through someone’s dream or because you’ve been deemed somebody who needs to have this. It highlights me in my community as somebody who is a leader. A lot of the women-run non-profit that address domestic violence or teen suicide. They address the ways our government inhibits us from being able to protect ourselves. They work in food shelters and food-sovereignty initiatives. These are community-building women.

“I still don’t fully understand why I’ve been identified as somebody who was brought into that circle. It might be as simple as me accepting the Golden Globe in the Blackfoot language. It’s a way of saying we’re still here.”

Fancy Dance is available on Apple TV+