Lily Gladstone’s High School Boyfriend Gifted Her Something to Wear If She Ever Attends Oscars (Exclusive)

Lily Gladstone’s loved ones always believed that she would one day make it to the Oscars.

The 37-year-old’s classmates at Mountlake Terrace High School in Mountlake Terrace, Wash., voted the graduating class of 2004 “most likely to win an Oscar,” the self-described “energetic” former theater kid tells PEOPLE.

Gladstone’s father, Howard, also encouraged her after a particularly rough round of bullying when she was a child. “Everyone will want to be your friend when you win an Oscar,” she remembers him telling her.

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During Gladstone’s sophomore year of high school, her first boyfriend gave her a significant gift.

“He got me out of a little, just one of those little machines where you put a few quarters in and then you get a little prize back. He got these little star-studded glasses, like these little kids’ star-studded glasses,” Gladstone recalls.

Lily Gladstone.

Matt Winkelmeyer/IndieWire via Getty

“He said, ‘You have to keep them and you have to wear them to the Oscars when you’re gone for a year,'” Killers of the Flower Moon says the star.

It is almost certain that Gladstone will receive an invitation. Since premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Martin Scorsese’s epic crime drama has received rave reviews and tons of Oscar news.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro star in first trailer for Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

Gladstone has already received Critics’ Choice and Golden Globe nominations for her performance as Mollie Burkhart, a Native Osage woman whose family members are killed for their oil-rich land in 1920s Oklahoma.

Of those glasses, Gladstone says, “I still have them,” she says. “If I end up going this year, I’ll dig them out and at least keep them in my purse.”

Gladstone says her father and mother Betty encouraged her when she showed an interest in acting at a young age.

Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023).

Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple

“Dad always had it in my head that this would be my path. And when you’re younger, you just believe it,” says Gladstone, who spent the first decade of her life living on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana. (Her father is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce descent.)

After Howard and Betty moved with their daughter to the Seattle area for jobs (he worked as a boilermaker in a shipyard; she was a teacher), Gladstone thrived in the theater, which provided her with a respite from the bullying she endured.

Killers of the Flower Moon Star Lily Gladstone considered quitting acting before Martin Scorsese hired her

“I think the only time I wasn’t made fun of when I was a kid was when I was doing a play because I suddenly made sense to people: in character, in costume, on stage,” says Gladstone. “When I started high school, I did a lot of theater.”

At that time, she dreamed of success as a working actress. “I think a lot of people do, especially as teenagers,” continues the star, who gained recognition working with Kristen Stewart in the 2016 film. Certain women.

Now that he’s walking red carpets and attending premieres, Gladstone is adjusting to his newfound fame. “You just roll with it,” she says.

Killers of the Flower Moon it is now on demand.

Find out more about Lily Gladstone in the new issue of PEOPLE magazine.

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Source: HIS Education