You may or may not bee-lieve what Gladstone's eyeing to do if she indeed embarks on a two-year break.
Lily Gladstone seemingly came out of nowhere. She was living with her parents in Seattle at the height of the pandemic and on the verge of taking a seasonal job when the fateful phone call came. It was Martin Scorsese, who wanted her to audition for Killers of the Flower Moon.
The rest is literally history.
Gladstone, 37, would become the first Native American woman to be nominated in the Best Actress category for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Mollie Kyle while starring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. The critical acclaim has undoubtedly catapulted her career. But in the midst of all this success, Gladstone tells Vanity Fair that she can absolutely see herself going on a two-year break.
To research hornets.
"A hundred percent. I was actually just on the phone with a friend last night, not freaking out or anything, but just feeling a fatigue settling in, just needing a palate cleanse," says Gladstone in a wide-ranging interview with the venerable magazine. "And it goes back to undergrad. One of my first acting professors, Jillian Campana, planted the idea that to stay interesting, you have to stay interested. And we tell stories. We are addicted to this process of getting in the headspace of another person. And I really love picking up new skills."
She continues, "So there's still a desire there. And that one [researching hornets] was also really, really feeling a need to protect my family through COVID, because I was looking for something that would fulfill me, fulfill a purpose. I really love bees. And the county where my parents live is one county south of where the murder hornets invaded. So all right, just get some seasonal work. The year before, COVID was the first time I felt like I had scraped together a real adult salary for a year. But it was six different projects, and some of them were overlapping time-wise. I just wanted something that would serve a higher purpose."
Gladstone, who is of Siksikaitsitapi and Niimiipuu heritage, is so enamored with bees that she once adopted a bumblebee for a couple of weeks after it found its way inside her house.
"He was just the sweetest little pet," she tells Vanity Fair. "And it gave me such a maternal, protective love of bees. My dog found him crawling around in some brush, and she eats bees and gets stung. So I saved him and put him on the back deck. And then he kept showing up at the back porch, trying to come in."
Gladstone says her dog tried to eat the bumblebee a couple of times, to no avail.
"Eventually she was just like, 'No, this is your brother,'" Gladstone quipped.
Meanwhile, ET spoke with Gladstone at the recent 96th Oscars Nominee Luncheon at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, and inquiring minds wanted to know if the Academy Award nomination had finally sunk in yet.
"You know, I felt it sink the most when the announcement that my film, Fancy Dance, that had been bought by Apple and they had a line about Academy Award-nominated," said Gladstone of the press release AppleTV+ sent out on Feb. 6 announcing it had landed the critically acclaimed feature "starring Academy Award nominee Lily Gladstone."
"It's like seeing it in print for that film, Fancy Dance, was the first time I kind of felt it," she added. "I was just like, 'OK, Academy Award nominee is attached to my name now.'"
Just about everyone within close proximity to Gladstone is eager to sing her praises, and that includes her co-star, DiCaprio.
In an ET exclusive on-set interview with DiCaprio, the 49-year-old star opened up about working with Gladstone, and playing her husband in the Scorsese-helmed drama.
"I felt her at moments living as Mollie," DiCaprio said of Gladstone, who plays a member of the Osage tribe, and wife to DiCaprio's Ernest Burkhart. "She embodied that character, she took on the soul of this woman and embraced herself into the Osage community."
"Once again, being from a different tribe, going to the Osage community, listening to [Mollie's] story and direct descendants and just embodied in every moral fiber of her being who Mollie was," DiCaprio continued. "[And she] expressed it through her performance in a very profound way."
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