Twenty-five years before Lily Gladstone shared the screen with Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon, she was a bit of a Titanic fanatic. “I loved that movie,” the star says in the new issue of PEOPLE.
“It was one of the first things I spent my allowance on,” Gladstone continues. “I pre-ordered the double VHS set from Toys ‘R’ Us while it was still around.”
For the 37-year-old Montana native, the frenzy surrounding the Oscar-winning epic — which hit theaters in 1997 and was released on VHS the following summer — is still fresh in her mind.
“I remember the commercial for Blockbuster, [with store employees] hearing a crowd of young women approaching,” she says. “[The workers] Set up Titanic on the shelf, and then you hear all the young ladies, and they go, ‘Uh-oh, here they come.’ ”
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Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic” (1997). 20thCentFox/Courtesy of Everett Collection
Gladstone, however, was not exactly a part of Leo-mania. “I loved that movie because of the movie and Kate Winslet. Leo was great in it because Jack Dawson was great,” Gladstone explains of his stowaway character.
“And it’s funny, whenever I had crushes in sixth grade — because the year it came out — I would kind of project my crushes onto Jack Dawson. It was never up to Jack Dawson,” she adds.
Titanic was not her introduction to DiCaprio. “I was a Leo fan long before that. My first movie I saw him in was, I can’t remember which was the first, but it was What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or This boy’s life“, she continues. “I loved it Romeo + Juliet.”
He was still her favorite The Man in the Iron Mask. In the loose adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel from 1998, DiCaprio also played King Louis XIV. and his twin brother Phillippe, who lived in exile.
“At that point I already knew I wanted to be an actress,” she says, “and to see an actor playing that kind of duality was really cool.”
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Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023).
Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple TV
More than two decades later, after auditioning for a historical drama directed by Martin Scorsese Killers of the Flower Moon, she was cast as Mollie, a Native Osage woman whose family is killed for their oil-rich land in 1920s Oklahoma. DiCaprio plays her duplicitous husband Ernesto, who has a hand in their deaths.
Gladstone’s nuanced performance as his confidant wife made her an awards season favorite and generated deafening Oscar buzz. (If nominated and wins, Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce descent, would be the first Native American woman to win best actress honors.)
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Just before the start of filming Killers In 2021, Gladstone was in Oklahoma on location reacquainting herself with DiCaprio and Scorsese films.
“I watched Dead, and it was the scene where Leo’s character is on the phone with Matt Damon’s character. They call each other. It’s like, ‘Whose number is this?’ And it’s just this incredible, tense confrontation where they’re both kind of afraid to talk,” he recalls of the 2006 crime drama.
“I was just watching the scene and then I got a text on my phone from some unknown number saying, ‘Hey, this is Leo. Do you want to come to our place for dinner?’ I look at him and I just wonder: ‘Is this really him?’ ”, continues Gladstone.
“Then I text production and say, ‘Hey, did Leo ask for my number?’ [They respond], ‘Yes, yes, that’s him.’ ”
Gladstone headed to the house where DiCaprio was staying, and his private chef cooked them dinner. Afterwards, we “hung out by the fire outside, simply [talking] about, I don’t know, our childhood,” says Gladstone.
Although playing DiCaprio, whose films she grew up with, will excite many, Gladstone always believed that the success she now enjoys would one day be possible.
“Dad always had it in my head that this was going to be my path,” says Gladstone. “And when you’re younger, you kind of believe it.”
Killers of the Flower Moon is now available on request.
Find out more about Lily Gladstone in the new issue of PEOPLE magazine.
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Source: HIS Education