How Oscar threat Lily Gladstone found her spark in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon

Lily Gladstone with onscreen love interest Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon (Picture: Apple)

Lily Gladstone has been generating some major Oscar buzz around her quietly devastating turn in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

You may not have heard of the Native American actress just yet, despite her acting CV boasting 2016’s Certain Women opposite Michelle Williams and Kristen Stewart, as well as appearances in TV shows Billions and Reservation Dogs.

However, the 37-year-old’s performance in Scorsese’s latest epic means she is about to go global, with months-worth of lavish praise from critics already building her up as a big best actress threat at the 2024 Academy Awards even before the film’s release.

Opposite industry titans and longtime Scorsese collaborators DiCaprio, 48, and new dad De Niro, 80, Gladstone more than holds her own as real-life Osage Nation woman Mollie Burkhart, whose family and community endured a horrifying spate of violent and suspicious deaths in 1920s Oklahoma, later found to be targeted murders due to their oil affluence.

The Osage people came into vast wealth after oil was discovered beneath their reservation in the 1890s, thought to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, which transformed them into the richest nation on Earth.

Prior to this, they had been forced to give up millions of acres of their ancestral lands in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and a lot of Oklahoma to the US Government as part of the Louisiana Purchase – but with such wealth (of a very different kind) suddenly afforded to them once more, it wasn’t long before non-Osage Oklahomans came sniffing around their ‘headrights’, an inheritable – but not saleable – share in the land’s oil money.

The Native American actress has earned high praise from critics since the film debuted at Cannes in May, with many predicting an Oscar for the breakout star (Picture: Getty)

The movie is based on David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, but its beating heart comes courtesy of Gladstone’s Mollie.

She has ‘headrights’ and is gentle yet shrewd as she navigates first the often uneasy relationship between the Osage and white US citizens of her locality, and secondly, a tentative romance with DiCaprio’s slightly clueless World War I veteran, Ernest Burkhart.

Put through the wringer by the horrors of what her family and fellow Osage people go through in Killers of the Flower Moon, Mollie’s endurance is impressive, with Gladstone’s sensitive portrayal called ‘so sympathetic’ by Variety, while the Evening Standard described it as ‘understated brilliance’ and the actress as ‘the star of the show’.

Metro.co.uk’s review also acknowledged that ‘the biggest buzz’ is for Gladstone’s performance, despite the undeniable prowess of her co-stars, which also includes current holder of the best actor Academy Award, Brendan Fraser, in a small role.

For Gladstone, portraying the most traditional of a set of four Native American sisters in the movie meant an array of stunning, handcrafted Osage outfits, which added extra brilliance to her captivating performance.

Gladstone plays Osage woman Mollie, who has ‘headrights’ to oil-rich land in Oklahoma – but a dark force appears to be taking out family members (Picture: Apple)

One of her guiding lights on Killers of the Flower Moon unquestionably came courtesy of Julie O’Keefe, who acted as lead Osage wardrobe consultant alongside costume designer Jacqueline West.

Legendary director Scorsese, 80, went to some lengths to involve the Osage in the making of this epic Western, with the help and guidance of Geoffrey Standing Bear, Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, who was also keen on O’Keefe’s involvement.

So, thanks to the Osage expert’s help, West explained: ‘Wardrobe is the bridge from the actor to the character and that that’s where Julie came in big time.’

‘It was so moving how Lily relied on her,’ she told Metro.co.uk.

Stunning and accurate Osage garments are a focal point of the movie, with Gladstone relying heavily on Osage wardrobe consultant Julie O’Keefe to help in easing her performance (Picture: Apple)

‘I made her clothing and designed it based on photographs, but the nuance of how she wore her blanket and her shawl was so important for it to make her feel she was Mollie.’

With the actress often in closed rehearsals with Scorsese and DiCaprio, O’Keefe would be standing by, ready to assist her with her costume and how she should wear – and could move – in traditional Osage garments.

‘I would go into Lily’s trailer and I would say, “Okay, today, show me exactly what you’re going to be doing,” because when you look at this movie, one of the takeaways from what’s going on in the life event of an Osage is how they’re wearing their blanket or how they’re wearing their shawl,’ O’Keefe shared.

‘Men have at least four ways to wear a blanket and women have around five to six, and it’s depending on what type of blanket it is or [if it’s] a shawl.’

On set with Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese (Picture: Apple)

An Osage Nation Ambassador-designed poster for the film, by Addie Roanhorse, emphasises theOsage’s intricately woven blankets (Picture: Apple)

O’Keefe has a specific example of the exacting accuracy the production held itself to with wardrobe, and then how she, in turn, could assist Gladstone – who is of Nez Perce, Blackfeet, Dutch and Cajun descent – in freeing up for her performance.

Mollie wears a black shawl in a scene in which she is comforting her sick mother Lizzie Q (played by Dances With Wolves’ Tantoo Cardinal), which historically would be decorated with French jet cut beads – ‘and you can tell the wealth of a woman by how many rows of beads she had on her shawl’.

‘She has on this shawl that has all this very luxurious fringe on it and she’s supposed to be combing her mother’s hair,’ O’Keefe explained.

However, that’s pretty cumbersome, and it was her job to help Gladstone with the ‘utility’ in the scene while still wearing her costume.

‘So, I fold it a different way and I bring it over – we had research pictures showing that too – and I was just like, “We’re gonna do it this way. Now use your hands.”’

The first meeting of Mollie and Ernest in Killers of the Flower Moon (Picture: Apple)

Co-stars Gladstone and DiCaprio at the film’s Cannes world premiere (Picture: Marc Piasecki/FilmMagic)

It’s the same for Gladstone’s first scene with DiCaprio in the movie, when Mollie and Ernest meet in town, and her clothes affect her bearing.

‘She’s prim and proper, she’s an Osage lady who’s in the back of his taxi, and she’s representing herself how she would, but in a dignified way – and that’s how she’s wearing that shawl,’ O’Keefe pointed out.

Unsurprisingly, she became pretty indispensable to Gladstone.

‘On the days when scenes would change – there was a point where it was supposed to be a scene with Leo and Bob, and it changed to a scene with Lily’s character, Mollie – she would say, “Is Julie here?!” West recalled.

For Oscar-nominated West, who has worked on Dune, as well as with Scorsese before on The Revenant and in designing Native American costumes for Terence Malick’s The New World in 2005, this was her first time working with a consultant, something she believes was essential.

Osage consultant Julie O’Keefe was considered indispensable by Gladstone, and worked alongside multi Oscar-nominated costume designer Jacqueline West (Picture: Getty)

‘They told me I could have her for 10 days and I kept her the whole film, that’s how important she was to me – because I felt to tell this story, you’ve got to do it right. And how do you do that without a consultant who grew up within that culture and knew the nuance?’

For DiCaprio and De Niro’s characters of Ernest and William Hale respectively, the hats ‘were a big deal’ for West too in how they ‘really tell a story’.

Alongside working with Stetson, she turned to Weather Hats in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, owned by the son (and grandson) of the men who previously made all of iconic screen cowboy John Wayne’s hats.

A key moment in Mollie and Ernest’s courtship sees her gift him a fine hat, which was something West – who has a fascination with Westerns – wanted to get right.

‘I went to him right off and I said, “Okay, what hat would Robert De Niro wear? This is his character. What hat would be a status hat that a very rich Osage woman would give a man who was non-Osage, but to take them up a notch from a flat-cap cabbie driver?” And he said, “The Cattleman’s Crease.”’

And it’s not quite so simple as that – with leather hats made it multiples for DiCaprio by one place (‘If you’re driving around and it blows off down the prairie, you’re going to need a double. One is nothing when it comes to hats in a movie,’ as West put it), as well as dozens of different crown shapes, brim shapes and brim fronts on the hats.

For West, the film’s various hats were ‘a big deal’, thanks to their storytelling role (Picture: Apple)

From Open to Gus to the Cattleman’s Crease, cowboy hats vary depending on crown and brim shapes (Picture: Apple)

‘The Osage always wore the Open, which I really like, because that made it their own, where it wasn’t a cowboy hat – and those are made just for the Osage, that’s how many they bought.’

Alongside this, West and O’Keefe estimate there were ‘oceans’ of other costume pieces made, including around 500 blankets, over 300 pairs of moccasins and ‘hundreds’ of Osage shirts, as well as the stunning wedding coats.

It might be the next epic Scorsese release with a reported $200million (£164m) budget and the kind of ‘Apple money’ that let West keep a consultant for months rather than days, but as O’Keefe shared: ‘We had many artists where their families were working on it, which made it feel more like a community project.’

And with Killers of the Flower Moon finally debuting in cinemas on Friday October 20, it won’t be long before audiences across the world get to witness the sharp ascent of Gladstone’s star.

Killers of the Flower Moon is in cinemas from today, and will stream on Apple TV Plus at a later date.

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She easily matches revered co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.