Lily Gladstone

“I have a profound love of bees.”

“I am shaped by my community - and I have been supported in my ambition to be an actor and storyteller.”

“In small-town America, you have to know somebody who loves film or recommends things to you, or you have to be really driven to it. You don't see it on the marquee of your local art house theater while you're walking to get your coffee in the morning.”

“I was always the squirrelly, overcharged kid.”

“Sometimes it's kind of hard to trust that people are going to trust you.”

“A lot of my training has been about surrendering to the moment, and it's a good life lesson that you can apply to just about anything. A lot of it is just being present and accepting what you have.”

“Stillness is something that I know a lot of people, period - even outside of the acting realm - just struggle with,. But it's really magic, what happens when you can sit and receive and just allow things to happen.”

“Martin Scorsese and I first met over Zoom; then I met with both Marty and Leonardo DiCaprio, but I never read the script with them. When my agent called me on December 1, 2020, I thought it was to schedule a chemistry read. Instead, it was an offer to play Mollie Burkhart, the lead of the film.”

“My very first paycheck was for $125 dollars as a featured extra as 'a crying girl' in a small indie film called 'Here Come the Disco Boys.' I was 12. This was when the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC were huge. I was able to work up real tears in my audition, and they made me a crying girl.”

“I thought, I don't want to move to L.A., because I'm kind of an atypical actor. I think it's going to be hard for me to find a place if I take that route.”

“Native women are unstoppable.”

“I think a lot of actors reach that point where you bargain with your passion and the reality of the business.”

“In most Native languages, most Indigenous languages, Blackfeet included, there are no gendered pronouns. There is no he/she, there's only they.”

“The 49ers are based on the California Gold Rush, which was an incredibly brutal time for California Indians.”

“The stories of our Indigenous people have shaped the very foundational fabric of our modern day. And so much of that is just not known, not felt, not acknowledged.”

“I hope that we will celebrate our differences and our similarities.”

“I've known several people who reached the point where they realised they could shape the world for their kids and introduce them to the traditional ways.”

“Some of the very first films, I think the very first film, was of Native people. It was us filming ourselves and documenting some of our dances. That's some of the very earliest archival film footage. The first movie, I think, was made by Native people.”

“When I was little, my father used to tell me he could see when I was lying because I'd get a twinkle in my eye. But I rarely make a meticulous choice in placing a gesture.”

“My dad's a boilermaker, my mom was a teacher.”