The star of Martin Scorsese’s highly-anticipated new feature, Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone, has revealed that she almost quit acting before the director requested to speak to her.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the actor explained that in 2020, she considered leaving the movie business to work at the Department of Agriculture. “You just wonder if it’s [acting] going to be sustainable. So I had my credit card out, registering for a data analytics course.”

However, as she was about to punch her PIN number in, she received an email notification on behalf of Scorsese’s team, requesting a Zoom meeting. The director had seen Gladstone’s performance in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 film Certain Women and wanted to cast her in his upcoming picture alongside Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio.

According to DiCaprio, “Lily has amazing presence and strength. She spent months studying Mollie Burkhart [her character] and her family, working extensively to understand the intricacies of this woman, her relationship with Ernest and her legacy within the Osage community. As a Native actor, in a lot of ways, she became a source of guidance for all of us, Scorsese included, in terms of how we told the story.”

Gladstone has always been a fan of Scorsese’s work, explaining, “I was watching some pretty sophisticated things for a kid. My first Marty movie was Kundun. My dad loved Kundun.”

Discussing Gladstone, Scorsese added: “I could see that she trusted in simplicity. She understood her own onscreen presence as an expressive instrument that could speak for itself. That’s quite rare. Her silences, as Mollie, were often more powerful than her words.”