Lily Gladstone Blew Up in Hollywood by Staying Outside It
Last year, Lily Gladstone found herself in a season defined by motion. In Fancy Dance, she played a woman navigating tribal custody systems while searching for her missing sister, and in Reservation Dogs, she appeared in a darkly funny, critically acclaimed series about Indigenous teens coming of age in rural Oklahoma. Then came Killers of the Flower Moon, where her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart — an Osage woman living through the Reign of Terror — earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, making her the first Native American woman ever nominated in the category.
That led to an avalanche of press, premieres, long flights, and early calls. As her schedule intensified, she felt an urge to return to the places and practices that kept her grounded — “recognizing where I was happy,” as she puts it. That place is Montana, where Gladstone was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation. Her latest project, the documentary Bring Them Home, traces a group of Blackfeet tribal members as they work to return wild bison to their ancestral lands. Gladstone narrates the film with the kind of clarity that comes from listening closely — to the community, to the land, and to her own gut. Here’s how she gets it done.
On choosing flexibility over hustle culture: There’s so much hustle culture pushed down everybody’s throats when they’re trying to be successful. But I’ve learned there’s a lot to be said for staying open. Flexible objects bend; they don’t break. That’s been huge for me. It’s not just about career decisions; it’s about how I move through this crazy whirlwind rise I’ve been riding these past couple of years. Instead of clinging to some rigid idea of what success has to look like, I try to let projects, opportunities, even seasons of my life have their own timeline and will. It’s less about forcing the sparkly path and more about asking, Where am I actually aligned with myself?
On the ritual that grounds her every day: Last March, I went back to my reservation and was brought into the Women’s Headdress Society. It’s the honor of my life and a responsibility I carry for the rest of my life. Part of that responsibility is taking care of myself every morning — and taking care of the headdress, because it’s an extension of me.
So every morning, ideally with the sun but not always, I wake up, cleanse, and smudge. I smudge my headdress and I put it to bed every night, too. Having it is a constant reminder that I’m part of something much bigger than myself. Starting and ending the day in that space of gratitude and responsibility keeps me grounded in my purpose and my power, before anything else starts pulling at me.
On her coffee routine: Right after that morning routine comes my coffee. At home, I have my own espresso machine. I’ll do a single or double shot with a tablespoon of honey. That’s my favorite: honey in coffee. When I’m out, I keep it simple and get a cold brew. It’s consistent, and it’s something I can sip over a long period of time. There’s something about those small, steady rituals — ceremony, then coffee — that creates a rhythm I can actually live inside of.
On building a career from Montana instead of Hollywood: I grew up on my reservation in Montana. I left when I was in middle school, but as soon as I could apply to college, I only applied to the University of Montana because I wanted to go home. I did theater there, community theater, and then independent films that would come through the state.
I remember working on Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian — it was shot on my reservation, with Benicio del Toro, directed by Arnaud Desplechin. I was doing local casting, and I ended up in a speaking role. One day in the makeup tent, I was talking to an L.A.-based artist and said, “I’m about to join SAG. I should probably find an agent. Should I go to L.A.?” She just said, “Honey, right now, Hollywood is everywhere. You’re getting work here, right? Stay where you’re happy.”
I realized that as a Montana actor, I’d already been producing without knowing it — helping with casting, locations, extras, just getting things moving. And I was doing it surrounded by elders, veterans, and my own tribal community. Hearing that advice not far from our tribal enrollment office, on my own land, made it clear: My experience as a human being in my own community mattered more than chasing some traditional industry path. Staying was a good choice. The work kept coming through Montana, and that’s ultimately what led to Certain Women and to the team I’m with now.
On the pressures of representation: At the point I’m at now, there’s a higher volume of everything: more inquiries, higher stakes around which projects to choose, and a real weight to what each choice represents. When you’re from a very underrepresented community, where people still think we all speak one language or that we don’t exist anymore, almost any move you make becomes representative of the whole. That’s something a lot of us grow up with, the understanding that how you act reflects on your whole community, for better or worse, often unfairly.
The way I navigate that is by turning the volume down enough to hear my own gut. It’s harder now, but it’s still there. I try not to make big moves if my gut is telling me not to. I think part of the ongoing work is figuring out how to refine that gut, how to feed it, how to take care of that creative microbiome so it’s healthy enough to guide you.
On a piece of advice from Kelly Reichardt: Toward the end of shooting Certain Women, I was talking with Kelly Reichardt about a project I was trying to help write and adapt. I’d been pouring energy into it, but it wasn’t really gaining momentum. She just shrugged and said, “Some things just don’t want to be movies.”
I come back to that a lot. I tend to feel like projects have their own metaphysical will, their own animism. They’re entities that want to become something specific, or not. If you’re too rigid about what something has to be, you’re easier to break. If you’re flexible, you can let a project grow on its own timeline, if it ever wants to grow at all. That idea takes some of the ego out of it and puts the focus back on listening, collaborating, and staying open.
On “making it”: I think of “making it” as seasonal. Human beings are observers. We notice cycles, patterns, cause and effect. Where I’m from, you live through enough seasons to understand that everything moves in a cycle. For every summer, there has to be a winter. For every flower that blooms, there has to be a cold, dormant bulb underground for a while.
In this line of work, there’s pressure to make success feel like a constant state. But projects have their own seasons: the time you spend making something, the time you spend carrying it out into the world, the time when it gets further and further away from you, and the time when you go back to make something new. Embracing that cycle is what gets a lot of people through the harder winters. There are stories you tell in winter that you don’t tell in summer. Summer is for work, harvest, play. Winter is for other kinds of work — internal, quiet, preparatory.
Right now, I have more freedom to be discerning than I did as a gig-to-gig actor, but I don’t think of it as pure freedom. It’s more responsibility to choose stories that will have impact, that can shape public perception in important ways, and to do right by them with the amount of work and energy I put in.
On feeding her people: There’s a moment in Bring Them Home that goes back to when I was 16 and played a game called “Make the Buffalo Run” for the first time. You take a stick with your pattern on it and run as fast as you can, screaming at the top of your lungs. When you run out of breath, you drop the stick. Traditionally, it was a way of choosing who the buffalo runner would be — kids would stir up the herds, make themselves big and loud so the head buffalo would chase them, and then tuck into a safe alcove while the herd ran over the cliff. That fed the people for the next year.
When I played it, I got lightheaded, felt blood rushing in my ears like hoofbeats, and imagined a time when buffalo would run again. I asked myself, How can I make the buffalo run? I was raised to be proud of my strength, which for me was my voice. Even then, “feeding my people” meant using my voice to bring attention to things. Now, with buffalo returning to our land and our lives, that question is still there, but there are so many ways to feed your people. Art is one of them.
On how she celebrates herself: Celebration can be simple. Sometimes it’s just treating myself to Joe & the Juice and letting that be enough. After all the ceremony, all the responsibility, all the seasons and cycles and decisions, there’s something grounding about saying, I did my job today. I showed up for my community, my work, myself. And then just enjoying a small, human treat on the way home.