Perhaps no actor received a greater injection of exposure and career boost during the awards season just past than did Lily Gladstone, the Indigenous performer who won SAG Award and Golden Globe trophies along with an Oscar nomination for her standout performance in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” While she lost the Academy Award for Best Actress to Emma Stone for “Poor Things,” Gladstone benefited tremendously, significantly elevating her stature after entering the campaign as a relative unknown.

“I think I’m probably not going to fully metabolize it for years,” she says. “What’s cool is that you develop this camaraderie with people who are going through it with you, and there’s this collective relief when you get to see each other on the other side of it all. I was at the Met Gala last night with Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and we were just talking about how nice it was to be there and just be ourselves without having a project we were selling or promoting. We get to just show up, talk about what we’re wearing, and have a nice evening.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.

Gladstone actually handled herself with uncommon class and grace while making the interview and awards show appearance rounds and was particularly chill about her Oscar nomination, making it clear that she wasn’t hinging her life on winning. “I mean, accolades are wonderful and meaningful,” she notes, “but what’s really meaningful is the work. It’s a gift to be able to do this and to keep doing this.”

To that end, Gladstone is now back on the circuit again with a new project: the eight-part Hulu limited series docudrama “Under the Bridge” that premiered on April 17 and streams a new episode each Wednesday through May 29. Based on the 2005 book of the same name by the late Rebecca Godfrey, it tells the heartbreaking story of the real-life 1997 murder of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old Canadian girl in British Columbia whose South Asian roots led to her being discriminated against, targeted, bullied and ultimately killed. Gladstone co-stars with Riley Keough in the role of Cam Bentland, an Indigenous policewoman adopted into a white, all-male family of cops and a character created for the adaptation. The case itself is little-known in the United States but in Canada might be compared to the tragedy of Matthew Shepard in the U.S.

What appealed to Gladstone that made her want to play this character? She admits being “a little hesitant” after being first approached about it. Why? “I was coming out of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ another true crime (project),” she replies. “If you look at all of the representation for Native women on television, four out of five roles is a cop. So I was wondering, ‘How is this one going to stand out from the other ones? Are we going to make a character that’s, dare I say, a trope?’” But after meeting with the series’ writer Quinn Shephard and executive producer Samir Mehta, Gladstone was convinced. “The arc that Cam goes on over the eight episodes is a really interesting one,” she adds.

One reason Gladstone dove in headfirst was that her character helps to generate a conversation about “a lot of really systemic injustices in Canada. Because Reena Virk’s case was so tragic, it was a wake-up call on a lot of different fronts. It very much changed missing-persons protocol in Victoria and British Columbia and I think eventually in all of Canada. And missing-persons cases are all too familiar to Indigenous communities. Reena’s case changed and had a ripple effect for a lot of missing indigenous women.”

It obviously remains supremely important to Gladstone to continue to play Indigenous characters in TV and film. “Any character I find myself in, there’s going to be Indigenous representation carried in that character,” she points out. “So I feel like whether or not it’s explicitly part of a plot or if it’s having an indigenous identity, a Native identity is crucial to the conversation of the piece. It’s also time for people to see us in roles where they have historically not. You look at Alaqua Cox as Echo. We have a Native superhero essentially. I think by and large we’re hoping that by having so much Indigenous talent working right now, myself included, we can work in spheres where we bend people’s perceptions about where we belong. Because in reality, we belong and truly are everywhere.”

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