Lily Gladstone found her Killers Of The Flower Moon character in the Osage language and oral tradition

It was “daunting” to play a real person who “not many living people have memory of,” Lily Gladstone admitted at a recent Killers Of The Flower Moon Q&A attended by The A.V. Club. One of her “biggest cues” to unlocking Mollie Burkhart as a character came from learning the Osage language, she said. “I found Mollie and I felt most like Mollie in the language.”

Developing the relationship with Mollie’s husband Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) was also enriched through Gladstone’s study of Osage culture. She pointed to one of her “favorite moments in the movie,” where Mollie calls Ernest a coyote: “[That] lovely scene that me and my three sisters sat down and kind of rewrote together, and it became what it was,” she explained. The double meaning of the word refers not just to the animal, but also to a story given to Gladstone by her language teacher “early, early on” about the coyote as a “trickster figure.”

The reference “was run through various members of the community to make sure that that story was appropriate for us to use, because a lot of these things are not for outsiders to use,” Gladstone said. “There are many, like, forms of trickster figures in Osage oral tradition. This one is kind of a self-serving, hedonistic, goofy one.”

The trickster tale “felt familiar” to the Golden Globe nominee to Blackfeet stories she heard growing up: “Our tricksters are also creators of the world we inhabit. And the longer you sit with those stories, the more they grow with you, you realize they were really teaching you something,” she reflected. Viewing the relationship through that lens “kind of changed the story in my perspective of it… it felt like a trickster story I was raised hearing all the time. When you’re young, they’re funny. And this version of the trickster doesn’t really win in the end. You know, they’re the ones that kind of get taught the lesson for acting poorly, but everybody in their wake suffers.”

(“[Our] word in Blackfeet for white man is the same word we use for our trickster figure, partly because of that duplicity, friend and foe,” Gladstone pointed out in reference to Ernest’s character. So it’s, you know, also a word that we use for friend. But it’s a tricky word and it’s one of my favorite ones.”)

Gladstone observed that Killers Of The Flower Moon evokes Hollywood’s Golden Age and the “classic storytelling methods of the 1950s.” And though “this film, I think, gratefully restores Native ladies in these very classic roles,” it was not an era that was respectful of indigenous people: “[We] were really erased from that history and made the villain in that history, it erased our presence as Native people from that period in film,” she said.

She came to understand Mollie as situated within that storytelling tradition, but for Gladstone, the Martin Scorsese-directed film “has never been a Western,” she said. “To me at the end, it’s from that perspective and that arc, the way that I was able to land it was just, I kept going back to… those cautionary tales I was told as a young woman growing up. And yeah, that’s one way I was able to ride it out.”