The 2024 Academy Award nominations were announced earlier this week, and Lily Gladstone received her first nomination ever for her phenomenal performance as Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Over the course of this awards season, Lily has also been nominated for several other awards including a Screen Actors Guild award, a Critics’ Choice Award, and a Golden Globe — the latter which she won.
But if you’re not super familiar with Lily, or just want to know more about her, here’s everything you need to know about her:
1.
First, Lily was born on August 2, 1986 and is a Leo.
2.
She’s originally from Browning, Montana and was raised on the Blackfeet Nation reservation until she was 11 years old. She and her family then moved to a suburban area in Seattle, and Lily recalled it felt like “culture shock.”
3.
Their mother worked as an early childhood education specialist, while her father worked in broadcast journalism.
4.
Her father is NiMíiPuu, or Nez Perce, and Siksikaitsitapi, also known as Blackfeet, and her mother is white. On her mother’s side, Lily is a descendant of the first cousin of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, while on her father’s side, she is the direct descendant of Blackfeet Chief Red Crow, one of the Great Plains leaders.
5.
Lily has opened up about using both “she/her” and “they/them” pronouns. “In most Native languages, most Indigenous languages, Blackfeet included, there are no gendered pronouns. There is no he/she, there’s only they,” Lily explained. “My pronoun use is partly a way of decolonizing gender for myself.”
6.
She first saw Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi when she was a kid, and her desire to be an Ewok was what made her want to become an actor.
7.
In high school, her yearbook superlative was “Most Likely to Win an Oscar,” and her former classmates are absolutely thrilled for her now that she’s been nominated for Best Actress — they’re even having an Oscars watch party to celebrate her.
8.
Lily went on to graduate from the University of Montana in 2008 with a BFA in Acting/Directing and a Native American Studies minor. While she was there, she became interested in Theatre of the Oppressed, which are techniques that use “theatre as a tool for transformation.”
9.
They were actually about to quit acting just before they got an email from Martin Scorsese asking to meet with them about KOTFM. “You just wonder if it’s going to be sustainable,” she said. “So I had my credit card out, registering for a data analytics course.”
10.
Lily arranged to be in Osage County on the Osage reservation when she heard the news of her Academy Award nom. “It just felt like I wanted to be as close to [my character] Mollie as I could be,” they explained.
11.
In KOTFM, Lily’s character grows more sick as she’s poisoned over the course of the film. To achieve this, Lily shared that they ended up losing around 30 pounds. They even used the same nutritionist that worked with Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club.
12.
While working on the film Certain Women with Michelle Williams, they bonded over both being from Montana — Lily even realized they were born at the same hospital.
13.
Finally, she’s also the first Native American to be nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars. “Why am I the first?” she said. “Why did it have to take this long for me to be the first Indigenous North American? Most of the films that show up in these categories are shot on Indigenous land in North America, and it’s taken this long.”
And if you can’t get enough of Lily, watch her in Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently streaming on Apple TV+.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/laurengarafano/facts-about-lily-gladstone