Lily Gladstone, the actress who made stillness the argument

Lily Gladstone

Photo: Frank Sun / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 2, 1986 Kalispell, Montana, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Killers of the Flower Moon, First Cow, Certain Women
Awards	Golden Globe · SAG Award · Los Angeles Film Critics Association · Boston Society of Film Critics · Gotham

The silence in Certain Women is deliberate and designed. Kelly Reichardt gives her unnamed ranch hand character — a woman who drives across Montana each week just to sit near the instructor she loves — almost no dialogue. The instrument is entirely in the eyes, the body, the particular weight of someone waiting for something they already know will not come. Martin Scorsese would later say that Lily Gladstone is one of very few actors who trust in stillness and quiet. What Reichardt built in 2016 was the proof of concept. What Scorsese did in 2023 was make the rest of the world look.

She was born on August 2, 1986, in Kalispell, Montana, to a father of Piegan Blackfeet and Nez Perce descent — his lineage reaching back to Red Crow, a Kainai Nation chief — and a white mother of European and Cajun heritage. Her first eleven years were spent on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, a landscape she has described as both formative and isolating. The family moved to Seattle when she was a teenager. By 2008 she had completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting and Directing at the University of Montana, with a minor in Native American Studies — a pairing that would shape everything that followed.

The early work was quiet in the way that a lot of Indigenous-led independent cinema is quiet: recognized within a small circuit and barely noticed outside it. She appeared in Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian in 2012, in Winter in the Blood in 2013. These were films that played festivals, found their audiences in specialized exhibition, and disappeared from public conversation within weeks. What Gladstone carried across all of them was already there — the ability to hold a scene without claiming it.

The turn came in 2016. Reichardt’s Certain Women, an adaptation of three linked short stories by Maile Meloy, gave Gladstone a role that required her to do almost nothing that would read as performance in a conventional sense. She watched. She listened. She drove to a night class she did not need because the teacher was there. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association gave her their Best Supporting Actress prize. The performance stands now as the most discussed quiet turn in American indie cinema of that decade.

She continued working with Reichardt in First Cow (2019), building relationships within Indigenous and independent film networks, appearing in the television series Billions and in a recurring role in Reservation Dogs. These were not years of stalling — they were years of accumulation. The Unknown Country (2022), directed by Morissa Maltz, won her a Gotham Award for Outstanding Lead Performance. But for anyone not paying close attention to independent film criticism, Lily Gladstone remained a name you might have encountered without registering.

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction account of the Osage Nation murders in 1920s Oklahoma, cast her as Mollie Burkhart — an Osage woman who marries the white nephew of the man orchestrating the killings of her people. The film ran over three hours and drew immediate debate: why does an Osage story center the perspective of the white man who helped destroy the Osage? Gladstone’s performance was the implicit counter-argument. Every scene she shared with Leonardo DiCaprio’s character asked the viewer to look at what his story was costing hers.

That tension between what the film meant to say and what Gladstone’s presence actually argued is where the critical conversation got complicated. Several Indigenous commentators noted that Scorsese’s structural choices reproduced the very logic the film was attempting to critique — DiCaprio as moral center, the Osage reduced to context for a white man’s reckoning. Gladstone navigated this publicly with care: she acknowledged the film’s scope while naming what was difficult about the collaboration. At the 81st Golden Globe Awards, she opened her acceptance speech in the Blackfeet language — the first time it had ever been spoken at that ceremony. The speech was an act of reclamation inside an industry that had just crowned her. She became the first Indigenous actor to win a Golden Globe for acting, and the first Native American nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Under the Bridge (2024), a Hulu limited series about the true-crime murder of teenager Reena Virk in British Columbia, cast her as Officer Cam Bentland — a detective’s stillness rather than romantic longing. She received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series, becoming one of the first Indigenous women nominated in an Emmy acting category.

Gladstone has described her gender identity as middle-gendered, noting that in the Blackfeet language — as in most Indigenous languages — there are no gendered pronouns. She uses both she/her and they/them, calling it partly a way of decolonizing gender for herself. In September 2025 she signed the Film Workers for Palestine boycott pledge. These public positions are not separable from her professional ones; the decision of which stories to tell has always been explicit.

Her schedule through 2026 and into 2027 shows no contraction. She starred in In Memoriam with Sharon Stone, released in 2026. She has joined the cast of The Thomas Crown Affair — the Amazon MGM remake directed by Michael B. Jordan, with a theatrical release scheduled for March 2027 — her largest commercial production to date. She is also mentoring the 2026 cohort of the Lone Peak Filmmaker Fellowship, working on the infrastructure of the industry that spent a decade not quite seeing her. What she does with the scale and visibility she now has is the question her career is currently posing.