Lily Gladstone
Gladstone was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation and is of Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce and European heritage. Her first decade of screen work was spent in American independent film, in parts that would look minor written down: Sunshine First Raise in Jimmy P., a concierge on the morning shift in Buster's Mal Heart, Lila in Walking Out, a chapter of Room 104. Kelly Reichardt is the director who noticed first, casting her in Certain Women in 2016 and again in First Cow.
What she does is listen on camera, which sounds like nothing and is close to the hardest thing an actor can be asked to do. In Certain Women the film simply stays on her face while somebody else talks, and the whole meaning of the story arrives through what she does not say. That patience is what Martin Scorsese built on in Killers of the Flower Moon, where she plays Mollie, an Osage woman who survives the killings of the 1920s while the men around her arrange her life for her. The performance holds the film's moral centre without ever raising its voice. She won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a drama, the first Native American to do so, and was nominated for the Academy Award.
The work since has stayed deliberately varied rather than climbing: a lead in Fancy Dance, a police officer in the series Under the Bridge, a role in the 2025 version of The Wedding Banquet, with In Memoriam listed for 2026. For an actress handed a very large door, she has been notably uninterested in walking through the obvious side of it.
Movies (11)
TV (4)
Where to start with Lily Gladstone
Leave the famous one until second and watch Certain Women first. Reichardt gives her a nearly wordless stretch of film, and it is the purest demonstration of what Gladstone does: the story happens on her face while another character talks past her. Everything later makes more sense once you have seen it.
Then go to Killers of the Flower Moon, which is long, deliberate and built around her stillness. Fancy Dance is the one to watch next, a smaller film that finally lets her lead and hands her both the humour and the anger. First Cow is the second Reichardt collaboration and a very small part in a very good film. For television, Under the Bridge casts her as an officer working a case from the inside of a community, and Walking Out is the early credit worth the detour.