“Lily is absolutely astonishing in this movie,” the Oscar winner says of Gladstone. “She carries the entire film and the story.” He also says that Scorsese knew straight away that she was the right actress for the part thanks to the “truthfulness” he saw in her eyes over a computer screen. “There was no reading. Marty just instinctively knew Lily was the one.
The two share the screen with Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion and Tantoo Cardinal in the film about the FBI investigation of a series of murders of the Osage people that took place in Oklahoma in the early 1920s. “It’s a completely forgotten part of American history, and an open wound that still festers,” DiCaprio says of the story. “Hollywood has a long history and checkered past in its depiction of Native American people. We need to do more. You know, we are coming towards a great reckoning of our past. The more that these stories can be told in a truthful way, the more it can be a healing process.”
The actor also opens up about the retooling Scorsese did on the project, after initially casting DiCaprio to play the FBI agent Tom White, a role that eventually went to Plemons. The filmmaker elected to bring Gladstone’s Mollie to the center of the story.