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Lily Gladstone says her favorite Star Wars characters are the Ewoks, "They’re such a beacon of Indigenous resistance. And they rocked it. They brought the Empire down, I’m sorry"

Star of Martin Scorsese tragedy ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ and Oscar frontrunner opens up about her “wild ride” and Native representation onscreen.

Now, all these years later, Gladstone may become the first Native American winner for acting in Oscar history for her quietly powerful turn as Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman preyed upon by her husband, Ernest ( Leonardo DiCaprio), and his rapacious uncle William Hale ( Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese ’s Killers of the Flower Moon. She gained such facility with the language and culture that Scorsese entrusted her with rewriting several scenes involving her character, including one in which she labels Ernest a “coyote” during a car ride, which came from an Osage story about “tricksters” that she’d heard from Cote, and another where Mollie and her sisters are gossiping about the white men in their orbit. While describing herself as “more of an Ethan Embry girl” growing up, owing to his roles in Empire Records and Can’t Hardly Wait, one of the DiCaprio films she enjoyed as a youngster provided an access point to understanding Mollie and Ernest’s toxic union.

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