Lily Gladstone, who on Sunday became the first Indigenous woman to win a Best Actress Golden Globe for her performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” told Rolling Stone that it would be “unfair” to blame “Reservation Dogs” star Devery Jacobs’ for her criticisms of the movie.
Jacobs, a First Nations actress who now costars in Marvel’s “Echo” on Disney+, blasted the film when it first came out. “Each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten,” Jacobs wrote on social media at the time, adding that it was “f—king hellfire” to watch “the horrors white men inflicted on us.”
In a Rolling Stone interview published on Friday, the writer noted that Gladstone’s “face drops” when asked about Jacobs’ comments.
“We’re friends. I crashed on her couch in Toronto when ‘Certain Women’ played at TIFF. I don’t want to bring heat back on her for this because I think that’s unfair. Her reaction is hers,” Gladstone told the magazine.
She added, “Her reaction is a response to a lot of trauma that particularly Native women feel seeing these things for the first time. I had a lot of time acclimating myself to the script. The Osage people have had their lives to understand this history. The process of making this movie gave a lot of people a chance to speak. Ultimately, Osage reaction is what I care about the most.”
Gladstone said that she and director Martin Scorsese intend to keep the relationships they made while making the film in Oklahoma’s Osage County. “I didn’t cut and run. Neither did Marty. Neither did production. There are still relationships there…The conversations need to keep happening.”
Despite her critique of the movie, amid her original takedown of the movie, Jacobs said that Gladstone “carried Mollie [with] tremendous grace.”
Gladstone, who researched the Osage language and took classes for weeks before filming started, also told Rolling Stone that Scorsese asked her to rewrite several of the scenes between her character Mollie and her husband Ernest (played by Leonardo DiCaprio.)
The actress and the director met with several Osage elders before production began. Scorsese told Osage News in May 2023, “I take this film as an offering to the Osage people and from our hearts.”
