Lily Gladstone on Chekhov and Listening
This Week on the Talk Easy Podcast with Sam Fragoso
Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries.
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Actor Lily Gladstone made history last month when she netted a Best Actress nomination for her work in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
At the top, we discuss this landmark moment for the film, her personal approach to the role of Mollie Kyle, and a revealing scene between Lily and Leonardo DiCaprio. Then, we walk through Gladstone’s connection to the “trickster” story, her creative upbringing on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, and her road to acting as a teenager and later a touring performer in her twenties.
On the back-half, Gladstone reflects on her early, complicated experiences auditioning in Hollywood, how she and Martin Scorsese aimed to honor the Osage legacy in this new project, the life-changing performance that came to be, and her hope for a true paradigm shift in the entertainment industry.
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From the episode:
Sam Fragoso: When it comes to the film Killers of the Flower Moon, for those who haven’t seen it, it’s based on a true story. It’s set on the Osage Nation Reservation a few decades after oil was discovered on the land. Of course, what comes with oil is a handful—or more than a handful—of opportunistic outsiders played by Robert De Niro and Leonard DiCaprio that are trying to take what’s not theirs, either by marriage, manipulation, or murder. Your character, Mollie, along with her mother and sisters, find themselves surrounded by this evil. This is an epic, loud, sweeping film— and yet your role, which is a little more taciturn, is the beating heart of the movie.
When it comes to this character, people often say in a Chekhov play, the person that is most powerful is the one who speaks the least. As you began embodying Mollie, was that idea in mind? More broadly, how did you think about taking up space in such an expansive film?
Lily Gladstone: I love that you brought it to Chekhov.
SF: I told you we were going to do something different today.
LG: I love it. It was in undergrad when I was pursuing my theater degree and acting and directing. Chekhov definitely resonated with me as an actor the most, because it’s the kind of writing that does really soar, like you said, when you focus on the small moments. When I’d read the book in anticipation of the casting, I immediately saw that Mollie was somebody that I understood. I understood that her power was in her reserve. When I was contextualizing that personality culturally and historically, there’s a lot going on. There’s a certain level of stoicism that is of service to yourself and your community. It also has, unfortunately, become kind of a trope about Native people. So there was a little bit of a line that I felt like I was walking there. I was so thankful that all of the sisters were being portrayed in very full ways.
SF: How did you walk that tightrope that you were talking about?
LG: So much of it was there in the character already, the way that she was written, but I knew that there would be a way of playing it that made sense artistically as well. On film, your eye does tend to go to the person who’s listening and figuring out what’s going on in the scene. Hale (De Niro) says it in the beginning, too, when he’s kind of giving Ernest (DiCaprio) the rundown of what it’s like here, saying that “Osage… just because they’re not saying much, don’t think they don’t know everything about everything.” As a character, I was assessing, not tipping my hand to things, not sucking the air out of the room— because doing so does actually distract you from the other things that are going on. So, it was important to establish Mollie’s power in that.
