Lily Gladstone
Birthdate: August 2, 1986 (39 Years Old)
Birthplace: Browning, Montana
Lily Gladstone has emerged as one of the finest, most subtle actors of her generation. She has quietly built a remarkable filmography since 2012, when she debuted in a supporting role in Arnaud Desplechin’s first film set in the U.S., Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013). The film starred Benicio del Toro, Mathieu Almaric, Gary Farmer, Misty Upham, and A Martinez and premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Gladstone’s second big-screen role was a supporting turn in Winter in the Blood (2013), based on the bestseller by fellow Blackfeet member James Welch, written and directed by brothers Alex and Andrew J. Smith, and produced by Native American author Sherman Alexie.
Just three years after her film debut, Lily Gladstone won (among several others) the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for Best Supporting Actress for her powerfully subdued breakthrough performance opposite Kristen Stewart in Kelly Reichardt’s marvelous Certain Women (2016), co-starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, James Le Gros, and Jared Harris, premiering at the Sundance film festival and becoming Reichardt’s most profitable movie to date.
Gladstone joined the cast of indie filmmaker Sarah Adina Smith’s surrealist Buster’s Mal Heart (2016), with Rami Malek, DJ Quails, Kate Lyn Sheil, Lin Shaye, and Nicholas Pryor, and premiering at the Toronto Film Festival. Gladstone reunited with the Smith brothers for their adventure drama, Walking Out (2017), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and co-starred Matt Bomer, Bill Pullman, Chaske Spencer, and Josh Wiggins.
Filmmaker Reichardt once again tapped Gladstone for a supporting role in her fine period drama, First Cow (2019), co-starring John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, and Gary Farmer, and premiering at the Telluride Film Festival before winning best film from the New York Film Critics Circle. Lily Gladstone had her first starring role and first screenplay credit in the highly praised indie film by director/co-writer Morissa Maltz, The Unknown Country (2022), with Raymond Lee and Richard Ray Whitman, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival.
After joining the cast of The Last Manhunt (2022), based on a story derived from true events by Thomas Pa’a Sibbett and cast member Jason Momoa, Gladstone starred in writer-director Erica Tremblay’s acclaimed drama set on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation, Fancy Dance (2023), with a cast including Shea Whigham and Audrey Wasilewski, and premiering at the Sundance film festival. Lily Gladstone was cast in her biggest role to date opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s epic, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), with Robert De Niro, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival.
Gladstone returned in the role of Tana in director/co-writer Morissa Maltz’s coming-of-age drama, Jazzy (2025), the follow-up to Maltz’s Unknown Country, starring Jasmine Bearkiller Shangreaux and Syriah Foohead Means, and released by Vertical after premiering in 2024 at the Tribeca Film Festival. Gladstone co-starred with Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-chan and Joan Chen in director/co-writer Andrew Ahn’s remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 movie, The Wedding Banquet (2025), co-written by James Schamus, and which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was then released by Bleecker Street (U.S. and Canada) and Universal Pictures (ex-U.S. and Canada).
Lily Gladstone joined the colorful ensemble of director/writer/producer Rob Burnett’s comedy, In Memoriam (date to be announced), co-starring Marc Marin, Judy Greer, Talia Ryder, Sharon Stone, Michael McKean, Regina Hall, and Justin Long, and produced by Invention Studios and Avalon. Gladstone co-starred with Bryan Cranston in the thriller, Lone Wolf (date to be announced), with O’Shea Jackson Jr., Jennifer Ehle, Chet Hanks, and Spencer Garrett, and was produced by Ted Hope, Christine Vachon, and Jordan Wagner.
Personal life
Lily Gladstone was born in Browning, Montana, and raised on the Blackfeet Nation reservation in Montana by her parents, a mother who was an early childhood education specialist, and a father who was a broadcast journalist. Gladstone has a mixed heritage of the Amskapi Pikuni (Blackfeet), Kainaiwa (Blood), and Nimíipuu (Nez Perce) peoples.
When Gladstone was 11, her family moved to the suburban Seattle neighborhood of Mountlake Terrace, where she graduated from high school. Gladstone attended the University of Montana, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2008 in acting-directing and minored in Native American Studies.
Awards
Nominee, Breakthrough Performer, Gotham Awards (2016); Nominee, Independent Spirit Awards (2017); Winner, Best Supporting Actress, Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards (2016); Nominee, Best Supporting Actress, National Society of Film Critics Awards (2017); Winner, Best Supporting Actress, Village Voice Poll (2016).
Lily Gladstone Movies
Actor
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Previous (8)
- 2025 |
- 2024 |
Fancy Dance
Following her sister's disappearance, a Native American hustler kidnaps her niece from the child's white grandparents and sets out for the state powwow in hopes of keeping what is left of their family intact.
- 2023 |
Killers of the Flower Moon
When oil is discovered in 1920s Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one - until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery.
- 2023 |
The Unknown Country
asTana
An unexpected invitation rushes a grieving young woman into a lonely road trip through the American Midwest towards the border between Texas and Mexico.
- 2017 |
Walking Out
asLila
An urban teenager journeys to Montana to hunt big game with his estranged father. Father and son struggle to connect, until a brutal encounter in the heart of the wilderness changes everything.
- 2017 |
Buster's Mal Heart
asMorning Shift Concierge
A family man's chance encounter with a conspiracy-obsessed drifter leaves him on the run from the police and an impending event known as the Inversion.
- 2016 |
Certain Women
asThe Rancher
The lives of three women intersect in small-town America, where each is imperfectly blazing a trail.
- -- | as Lee
Writer
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Previous (1)
- 2023 |
The Unknown Country
An unexpected invitation rushes a grieving young woman into a lonely road trip through the American Midwest towards the border between Texas and Mexico.
Facts About Lily Gladstone
AKA: Red Crow Mountain, a peak in the mountain range near Kalispell, Montana, is named for the Amskapi Pikuni (Blackfeet) leader, Red Crow, the great-great-great paternal grandfather of Lily Gladstone. Gladstone’s maternal great-great-grandfather was first cousin to British Prime Minister William Gladstone.
Theater Work: Gladstone works with Red Eagle Soaring, the Native American youth theater program in Seattle, where she developed her acting skills in high school, and where she’s also a member of the touring educational theater group, Living Voices.
Lily Gladstone on her birthplace: Gladstone has noted of Montanans and Montana, where she was born, that “Montanans are infused with landscape. You can sit in a landscape for hours and disappear. You can be part of the quiet. Or you hear the songs of the wind. I remember being hollowed out by the whistle of the wind as a kid. You were at the whim of your landscape and had to live with it.”
