Lily Gladstone has lived the type of life they make movies about. This might sound like a cliche, but with Gladstone it’s true. Before the actor—who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana and then moved to Seattle in middle school—became a critically adored, globally recognized star, she once considered leaving the profession altogether.

Then she got the call from Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon. This anecdote got passed around a lot during last Oscar season, when Gladstone was nominated for Best Actress. But in a movie of her life, it would be only the first act. She’s already hard at work on the second. 

When Gladstone was growing up, her family would drive all the way from rural Montana to Seattle to visit her grandmother, who had lived here since the 1950s. To Gladstone, Montana was, as the saying goes, “a small town with really long streets.” It was a place where even as a child, her love of theater could not be fully nourished. The only chances she had to do “bigger” productions were when the Missoula Children’s Theatre visited the small schoolhouse she attended. But Seattle—Seattle was the future. 

As her family drove west on I-90 for those visits, they were driving to the place where Gladstone would eventually start acting at the Stone Soup Theatre, and get an early cinematic education courtesy of her grandmother, Ermith Gladstone. Ermith would go to the movies as much as she could, and rewatch VHS tapes at home of movies she had recorded from television. She loved every genre, especially westerns (even as Indigenous actors were often shut out from them), and was familiar with Scorsese long before her son’s daughter would go on to star in one of his best films.

When she talks about her grandmother, Gladstone gets wistful as the memories come pouring out, even doing a loving impression of the “Shirley Temple cadence” in which the older woman would speak with her. Before she passed away in 2022, Ermith was able to see how her grandchild was now making the kinds of movies they both loved.

The one that really marked her granddaughter’s arrival was Kelly Reichardt’s
Certain Women (2016), in which she played a soft-spoken, soulful rancher. There’s a scene in that film where Gladstone is sitting in a diner across from Kristen Stewart. Precious few lines are exchanged, but Gladstone’s aura is arresting. Scorsese himself was so affected that he cast her in Killers after seeing her here. This phenomenon extends to all of her roles. In each one she takes on, big or small, she is a subtle center of gravity that draws you in. Gladstone has presence. It is like the world itself goes silent before each subtle-yet-shattering move or look, and only then does the sound come rushing back in.

Gladstone has presence offscreen, too, like a movie star of yesteryear. Whether it’s strolling into the SIFF Uptown, where a packed local crowd has come to see her, or sitting beside Greta Gerwig in a chaotic press room at Cannes, she is always fully herself. In a landscape dominated by franchises and IP above all else, she is a pure performer. She has a passionate commitment to craft, talking openly about the way she works and never seeming concerned about being labeled with the anti-intellectual smear of “pretentious.” 

Her newest film is Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance, which tells the story of a hustler named Jax who’s taking care of a niece, Roki, after her mother disappears. This was the movie being shown at the packed SIFF Uptown on that brisk Wednesday evening last December. That night, Gladstone was presented with the John Hartl Award, named for the late Seattle Times film critic by the Seattle Film Critics Society (of which, full disclosure, I am a member). With costar Isabel Deroy-Olson and cowriter Miciana Alise also in attendance, it was a night of celebration for an independent film with deep roots in Seattle’s film community. In particular, it was a night to celebrate the lasting legacy of the filmmaker Lynn Shelton, who died in 2020.

In 2021, the local theater Northwest Film Forum awarded Fancy Dance director Tremblay the Lynn Shelton “Of a Certain Age” grant to help her make her debut. The yearly, project-based award is given to a woman, nonbinary, and/or transgender US filmmaker who is 39 or older and is working on their first narrative feature as a director. It was a way of acknowledging that filmmakers like Shelton, who directed her first feature at 39 and went on to make Humpday, Your Sister's Sister, and Sword of Trust, still have valuable stories to tell. Fancy Dance is that kind of movie. 

“She’s such a fixture in Seattle film. Lynn was always one of those directors I kind of assumed I would work with one day,” Gladstone says, recalling how, at the first Sundance she went to, she watched a film that Shelton and Megan Griffiths worked on. “It’s very strange that she’s not here because I still have that weird feeling and want to be like, ‘Oh, we’ll cross paths someday! We’ll work together someday.’ She made the kind of films that I love to watch.”

Back when she was doing camera coaching (where a performer learns how to have confidence on camera) as a teenager, Gladstone says Griffiths and Shelton were two of the primary artists making films in the region. One of the first films she saw at that initial Sundance, the festival where Fancy Dance would later have its world premiere, was Griffiths’s The Off Hours, which Shelton acted in. It also starred one of Gladstone’s old drama teachers, Tony Doupé. He is currently the chair of the film and theater department at Shoreline Community College, where Gladstone’s mother taught, and where Gladstone participated in student films. The film community in Seattle really is tight-knit. 

Gladstone made her feature debut in 2012 in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, followed by Winter in the Blood the next year. These were small parts in relatively small films. But if Shelton’s career taught Gladstone anything, it’s that humble beginnings can lead to enduring legacies. Gladstone appreciates being asked about this local history, she says, because it’s hard to bring it up herself. “How do you grieve somebody that you never met?” she says, before trailing off. “It feels like that’s not my area to step into, but I did definitely feel that. I feel her hand in [Fancy Dance] for sure.”

No stranger to the challenges of making an independent film, Gladstone is aware that performing in higher-profile projects like Killers of the Flower Moon is the best way to get attention for her smaller ones. From the start, she has praised Scorsese as a great supporter of other filmmakers. Killers of the Flower Moon, she says, opened the door for more voices. It was the beginning of a cinematic conversation and not the end of one. 

“I feel like it’s a testament to everything that I hoped would be possible for Native cinema with someone like Martin Scorsese making a film like Killers of the Flower Moon. Like when Marty makes a movie, people want to see it. When he has something to say as a filmmaker, people want to hear it. Marty has the ability to break through doors and pierce that veil. The way that Killers of the Flower Moon was made left so much for the audience to lean into and want more from,” Gladstone says, while also acknowledging that while the films speak to each other in interesting ways, the difference in resources available to Fancy Dance versus this larger-budget film was significant. 

“Making both films a year apart from each other, on the same landscape and the same communities, a lot of times with a lot of the same actors and same locations, and, unfortunately, the same story, murdered Indigenous people, every step of the way having those funny little comparisons, like knowing I had five months to learn Osage with a whole language department because we had the budget to do so, versus having two weeks with one language teacher who would be on set with us, but just kind of drill our lines with us before we shot as best as we could. Isabel [Deroy-Olson] and I were just praying we weren’t gonna forget anything,” she says with a laugh.

“But still, in the end, seeing both, you see these incredible scenes where you hear the language spoken, and the people who are First Language speakers feel honored by it. They felt like they saw the work done.” Gladstone then apologizes, unnecessarily, for “starting to get in the weeds a little bit” even as this is exactly the behind-the-scenes work of making the world of a film come to life that can go overlooked. It’s the type of thing we give actors awards for, but rarely do we get to fully appreciate just how much effort goes into every facet of these rich performances.

Gladstone wants Fancy Dance to be something that stands on its own. After all, even with the connective thematic tissue between the two films, her latest is a modern story about modern Indigenous women, as opposed to the historical Killers, that deserves to be viewed on its own terms. Gladstone says she wanted to make sure not to let the bigger film overshadow the smaller one. Fancy Dance actually premiered in festivals before Killers, but it didn’t pick up distribution right away. So while she was promoting Killers, Gladstone frequently used her platform to elevate the smaller movie.

“It was really remarkable to see what I hoped was going to happen, that Killers of the Flower Moon introduced a mass audience to have a conversation and, not just have a conversation, but to really lean in and care about Native women and Native communities and our survival,” Gladstone says. “Sure enough, people who were lucky enough to catch Fancy Dance in the festival circuit and then had also seen Killers immediately saw that these two films needed to be seen in tandem with each other. It was really wonderful that Fancy Dance was there and ready to go right around the time people were seeing Killers, engaging with it, and wanting more.”

Now, Fancy Dance, which was released in theaters earlier this summer, is streaming right alongside Killers on Apple TV+. In discussing the relationship between the two movies, Gladstone also highlights how she was able to explore things in a smaller independent film that she couldn’t in a bigger studio film. “In an indie space, I think you’re allowed to have conversations that in a studio space you have to navigate in a different way.” She points to the way Scorsese “had to even fight” to make Killers more about her character and her relationship rather than just being an “FBI origin story.”

This is particularly ironic, Gladstone notes. The bureau was formed in part to solve cases of Indigenous murder, “when now it’s the last thing that they do, but they’re the only ones that have the jurisdiction to do so.” She says that, regardless of whether it is a manpower issue or a funding issue, the outcome remains the same: it falls on Indigenous women and communities to try to build ways to look out for themselves when nobody else will. 

Gladstone’s beloved grandmother Ermith lived this reality. She attended the Chemawa Indian School in Oregon, where approximately 270 students died while under care between 1880 and 1945. Then, after the Indian Relocation Act pushed Indigenous people to move to cities, she moved to Seattle and began working as a babysitter. It was a long road for her just to be able to sit down and watch movies like 1975’s I Will Fight No More or the long-running series Gunsmoke with her granddaughter. Gladstone says that history, and the relationship they built, is informing her approach to many of her films. 

When it comes to Jax, at the center of her latest film, Gladstone says she walked onto set more nervous than she had been before about taking on a character. At one point, she says, producers asked Tremblay to come up with a potential list of alternates to play Jax in the event Gladstone couldn’t, but the director refused, saying there was no one else who could play the role. The part had been written specifically for Gladstone after she had appeared in Tremblay’s short film Little Chief. And the longer she worked on it, the more comfortable she felt. She credits the writing.

“All throughout the whole film I really love these little moments that are placed in there that Indigenous audiences will see and recognize that live so naturally in the fabric of just the world they’re in,” Gladstone says. “I loved that Jax and Roki, because she’s learning from her auntie, they’re not ‘model minorities.’ I think a lot of times we fall into that trap when we’re seeking out stories about nonwhite experiences. We have perfect heroes, and that’s not reality. You have people that do what they can with the cards that they’re dealt. They play the hand that they have. I loved that I got to play a character that you would have seen in Thelma & Louise or Paper Moon. This film takes us on a kind of similar journey while having really grounded conversations in our reality.”

Gladstone says Jax represents a unique place in her filmography. She points to how the character “took over” as she began moving through the scenes, after having grown subconsciously within her. “I didn’t really have the time to overprepare for her. It was perfect.” 

Movies aren’t filmed chronologically. And the final day of shooting Fancy Dance was the scene when Jax and niece Roki set out on their journey together. They know, all along, that it might also be their last. It’s a beautiful moment in the film. And a reminder that no matter what cinematic journeys lie ahead for Gladstone—from Montana to Seattle and beyond—each has the potential to be something special.