Life after Killers of the Flower Moon: what Lily Gladstone did next
Killers of the Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone talks about her new comedy, The Wedding Banquet, and her sexuality and her friend Leonardo DiCaprio.
When Lily Gladstone became the first Native American to be nominated for a leading actress Oscar, for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, it was for an extraordinary performance that was largely silent, her bottomless brown eyes doing much of the work.
I half expect lunch with Gladstone to be a similar affair, lots of meaningful glances and deathly pauses. Not on your nelly. From the moment she sits down at the restaurant on the South Bank in London to the moment we say goodbye more than an hour later, Gladstone barely stops speaking.
In an earnest monotone and in epic detail she talks about growing up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, being descended from British prime minister William Gladstone, her friendship with Leonardo DiCaprio, who played her husband in Killers of the Flower Moon, her sexuality, Native American history – on which she is particularly well informed – and her excellent new comedy, The Wedding Banquet.
It feels more like a seminar than an interview, although the pontificating comes with flashes of straight-faced wit. Pain is embedded in Native American culture, the 38-year-old says, “but humour is our coping mechanism”. At the end, with her chicken salad hardly touched, I thank her for an interesting conversation. “I’m interesting and longwinded,” admits Gladstone, who is neither falsely modest nor lacking in self-awareness.
Directed by Korean-American filmmaker Andrew Ahn, The Wedding Banquet is a remake of Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same name that transplants the drama from New York to the Asian gay community in Seattle.
Gladstone’s character, Lee, lives with Angela (played by the Vietnamese-American actor Kelly Marie Tran from Star Wars: The Last Jedi), and is desperate to have a child (more so than Angela). Their friends are Chris (Saturday Night Live Chinese-American comedian Bowen Yang) and his boyfriend, Min (Korean actor Han Gi-chan), who wants to get married (more so than Chris).
It’s decided that Min, who is in need of a green card, will enter into a sham marriage with Angela, which entails a visit from his rich Korean grandmother, whom they must convince they are in love. In a funny scene borrowed from the original film, they de-gay Angela and Lee’s house, hiding the Elliot Page biography and taking down the Lilith Fair poster.
Where does Gladstone stand on the importance of gay characters being played by gay actors? Yang and Han are gay and Tran has described herself as “queer”. “Lived experience is the important thing, what the hardships you’ve had to face are,” she says.
Gladstone calls herself “queer”, “pansexual” and “straight”. “I can’t put a label on it,” she says. “One of the big things that tipped me to my queerness is I don’t have the draw to motherhood the way a lot of women have. There was a period of my life when I thought I might be asexual because I had no sexual attraction to anybody. I had a romantic attraction to everybody but no sexual desire. Then the word ‘demisexual’ came into play, where it’s, like, I don’t feel sexual stirring at all unless I actually care about this person, no matter who they are.” That’s a better fit, she thinks, although she won’t say if she has a partner.
Some older men on her reservation can be homophobic, she says, although “they have no problem if it’s two women”. More of an issue is whether you are even distantly related to a potential mate. “At an early age you’re conditioned: Who’s your family? Who is it OK to date? It’s, like, ‘Stay away from them – they’re your cousin.’ Even if that cousin relationship goes back 10 generations, the family is so tight-knit. In our language there’s not a word for ‘cousin’. Everybody in your generation who shares the same pool of aunties and grandmothers, they are your ‘siblings’.”
In The Wedding Banquet Gladstone was the sole non-Asian among the main cast, which reminded her of leaving her reservation for high school in Seattle and being “the only Native student in the class. It was always the Korean kids that would ask me if I was mixed Asian and reach out to be friends first. There was something that felt familiar to them”.
While Gladstone’s ethnicity is not necessarily a plot point in her projects, it’s always apparent. “Danny DeVito said that no matter which character he plays, they are all going to be short. Whatever character I play is going to be indigenous,” she says, whether that’s her 2016 role as a ranch hand pining for Kristen Stewart’s lawyer in Certain Women or a woman with whom Chuck Rhoades Sr fathers a child in Billions.
Her identity, Gladstone insists, is more collective than individual. When she was cast in Killers of the Flower Moon she “had no interest in making it about growing my own career because that gives me anxiety”. Why?
“Individuals are not that interesting. What’s the community that we’re representing? What’s the history that we’re carrying?”
Scorsese’s 2023 film told the true story of the murders of members of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma by white men with eyes on their oil-rich land. More than holding her own opposite DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, Gladstone won the Golden Globe for best actress in a drama, another first for a Native American. March 26, 2024, was named “Lily Gladstone Day” by the Blackfeet Nation to honour her success.
Although the role she played was from a different tribe “there’s an official Osage Nation sealed document supporting my Oscar nomination. It’s almost annoying because that role more than anything I’ve played feels like it doesn’t belong to me. I’ve made lifelong relationships with Osage folks and I know that the film is theirs, it’s not mine”.
“Leo is one of my better friends,” she says. “We’re in touch pretty often – when I’m in LA we hang out, when we’re in Europe we hang out.” When DiCaprio wanted to make a donation to the Osage community, he asked her advice on who to give it to. “We both really believe in grassroots organising – he knows that with large non-profits a lot of the time money goes to overheads.”
The awards season whirl around Killers of the Flower Moon allowed Gladstone to meet some of her idols. “I’ve worshipped Cate Blanchett since I was 13. She hosted a talk with me about my work,” she says. “I think she saw what a subtle role it was, how difficult it was. That was just, like, ‘I can quit now’. I want to cry just thinking about it.”
Home is Seattle, the city to which her father moved after the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. “The idea was, the more Natives that leave the reservation, the more likely they are going to intermarry with people who are not indigenous and in a few generations we can take their land,” she says.
Gladstone’s heritage is a heady mix. Her mother, who has Creole, French Huguenot and Dutch ancestry, met her father when she worked on a community program on his reserve in Montana. Her father’s mother was from the Nez Perce tribe in Idaho while his father was a Blackfeet and a distant relative of William Gladstone, the leader of Britain’s Liberal Party in the 19th century.
“The progressive politics that he held were celebrated in my family – having a prime minister who was pro-Irish Home Rule was pretty badass,” she says. The celebration is tempered by the fact that his family were slave owners: “It’s pretty vile. The Gladstone name has a lot of atoning to do.”
Her father continued the nobler side of the family tradition, becoming the first president of the American Indian Student Alliance at the University of Washington, although he was “bullied and pushed out”, she says. “Anybody who was involved in civil rights activism in the 1970s had an FBI profile. We used to joke about the unmarked vans that would park in front of our house on the reservation.”
She speaks with equal pride of her paternal grandmother, who was “born prematurely in a one-room log cabin during the Depression. That’s a very low chance of survival”. Her grandma attended Chemawa Indian School in Oregon, a boarding school where in 2021 dozens of unmarked graves were discovered, many of them thought to contain pupils who had succumbed to abuse or neglect. After years of silence Gladstone’s grandmother told her: “Yeah, there were some parts of Chemawa that were pretty rough.”
Coming up, Gladstone has In Memoriam, a comedy in which she plays the therapist to Marc Maron’s embittered actor, and Lone Wolf, a thriller in which she features opposite Bryan Cranston. She is also developing a biopic in which she portrays Karen Dalton, the Cherokee-Irish singer beloved of Bob Dylan.
She pronounces it bi-O-pic, “but Leo corrects me all the time”. DiCaprio prefers bio-pic, but I’m with Gladstone. “Bi-O-pic does sound fancier, doesn’t it?”
She also hopes to play the lead in Memory Police, a screen adaptation by Charlie Kaufman of Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian novel.
“Charlie is probably my favourite screenwriter, just the loveliest man, and Adaptation is my favourite movie,” she says. “Again, it’s one of those roles that’s very tricky, very non-verbal.” When you chat this much off screen, why worry about talking on it?
The Times
The Wedding Banquet is in cinemas
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