Lily Gladstone wanted to honour Mollie Burkhart's family with her performance in 'Killers of the Flower Moon'.
Lily Gladstone didn't want to let down Mollie Burkhart's family on Killers of the Flower Moon
The 37-year-old actress plays Mollie, an Osage woman, in Martin Scorsese's epic and explained how she placed lots of value on the opinion of her character's granddaughter Margie.
Lily told Deadline: "The person whose opinion I valued most at the end of the day was always going to be Margie Burkhart, who was Mollie's granddaughter and Cowboy's daughter. Margie had never met her grandmother – Mollie passed away in 1936 – but she had pieced together her sense of who Mollie would've been from little stories from her dad, but not many.
"So, when we were meeting with Margie, I knew that she wasn't going to hand me a list of, 'This is Mollie and how to play her.' There was no blueprint, but where you find that is the legacy they leave within their family. So, there's a lot of small gestures that came from that meeting. The way Margie just is around people. A lot of that went into Mollie."
Lily has earned a Golden Globe nomination for her work in the movie and reflected on getting to meet Margie's family at the picture's Osage premiere.
She recalled: "I got to see her in person at our Osage premiere. And she talked about how she was amazed that we had done it, we accomplished it.
"She just embraced me so tightly. She introduced me to her grandchildren, so Mollie's great-great-grandchildren. I remember the youngest one that I met. I could see Mollie's face just so perfectly, and for a second the way it felt like I was able to look at her, it was like she was meeting her grandma. It's like the way she met her grandma was through this film."
Tagged in Martin Scorsese