other than wanting to be an Ewok it wasn't all about being on camera by the way just FYI please hold that thought one of the greatest most underrated character actor studies of all time the Ewok thank you absolutely it needs to come back in a major way perfect balance between cute animal cute pit and human and [Music] vicious are you comfortable can we get suitably uncomfortable in the most fun way ever is this really your karaoke
song absolutely it's so interactive I mean case Bo can't go through the song without a really bad viol impression for at least one verse I have to hit it when I'm a walk I Str and I'm so Str out I'm high as a I just my stop to check you out let me go on like a Blister in the Sun let me go on big hands I know you're the one yay so oh yeah so good that moment in karaoke when you realize that you've
picked a song because you like it but you don't have it man that's the worst I did The One I Love by Arian once and I did not have that do you know how high that is oh yeah I mean I I had uh this wasn't very long after I'd started like having cocktails cuz I was pretty straight edge until my late 20s so I didn't have any like sense of my uh my capacity and after like two gen and tonics I really thought I could go in
there and sing Rolling in the Deep by aell and I really could not you know what's funny you know what's funny I was in a karaoke club late last year and uh I got started and I'm always the one that started off and I knocked out a couple of good good ones and then I tried to hit Skyfall and my wife was like babe we can tumble oh okay that's some octave work right there I'm not prepared that's a
particularly high would be the first person to say n bad to both of us oh she's so funny she's a best she is so funny oh my god um you love music huh yeah some music best answer to that question ever it's subjective for me mainly um yep yeah great uniter and great divider 100% when was music most important to you as a youth as somebody when you really leaned in and it helped you carve
your identity out like what was that well I mean the first album I bought myself was Crazy Sexy Cool by TLC great start it was I mean it was definitely above what my little like 8 nyear Old brain could comprehend with some songs on that album yeah yeah yeah it's deep not yeah it's deep and then also uh it's crazy sexy and cool yep yep and I remember it almost felt like sneaking around with my friends listening to the
um the left eye track where it ends with her flushing the toilet yeah we're like turn it down mom and dad are going to well I wondered about Dad actually I wondered about like um you know how open you know coming from a place place where where family is really important and we know we have to stick together and we have to work together and there are things that we need to teach each other um but it's go listen to Eminem totally
fine I wonder I sort of wondered like you know where the where the sort of the capacity for um music and culture and and and if it feels like as a youth you can run around and discover things as well as maintain your own identity you know I think with my parents particularly CU they weren't um they didn't like Hawk over me or like make choices for me I remember um when I was young enough I asked them if God was
real and they asked me what I thought they had no no like agenda they had what an amazing conversation to have with you folks yeah yeah they they're fantastic you know my mom's a behaviorist she's uh got a specialty in early childhood education um dad's a blue collar man with a very uh Scholastic mind and launches into a lot of his own studies about things wow so open thinkers hard workers mhm absolutely yeah 100% well
said brilliant brilliant well listen it's so nice to meet you congratulations um you know it's a word that gets thrown around a lot very sinere from the side of the desk to you not just on the way it's being um your work is being perceived and rewarded but just on the work itself thank you just an incredible incredible body of work that you put into just this film and I know the work you put into getting to
this point in your life I'm so excited to talk to you um thank you so you know the these good times that have happened in the last few months how sticky do you think they are you know I remember when I started winning Awards and stuff for what I used to do and I'd wake up the next morning I'd be like that's a bit MD like I don't really know what that means I've got go go to work today and do it again you know um how much of it's going
to stick around do you think and how much do you let it slide off I mean it's kind of a mix like experiences are what stay with me you know and even though my suitcase is a little heavier with some of these statues I'm walking around with now yeah I think what makes it last for me is more the impact that it has had on other people like the glow when you know I after that I was like okay I I can just
stop now I can be done now cuz I mean the videos I saw it come in of people watching it together like there was a whole family back on my res that were watching it and just like ly one ly one what no shut up come running from the other room and then another video of this young black feet family with this little girl that started talking black feet back to me on the screen and when I was done she went so Cy which means it's
good like I did a good job wow um you're not going to forget that feeling because it's a feeling and the feeling attaches itself to the memory impulse and it's like all right that's I'll always have that feeling right yep and that's the thing that's like the win for me is that everybody you know everybody from my community and in country at large just the the excitement from a lot of indigenous folks worldwide cuz I
remember like when Kesha Castle Hughes was nominated for whale rid or what that meant to me yeah you know I'm from New Zealand so I mean resonated through my whole home country and I mean it was so much pride in that and my wife is half M and I mean it just yeah it was a moment it was yeah having that kind of narrative with a young woman leading it talking about like just kind of our role
shifting as as the world changes and like women stepping up um you know we always have but just uh and then like this young girl that just carried it so beautifully and I felt so represented in that even though like I'm not Mari um like it's a very similar experience in that film and um it was such a tender like portrayal of that complicated relationship with her dad and it's like understanding who her dad was I could go
on and on about it yeah and also very interesting because to some degree I'm sure Kesha would acknowledge that she she went through somewhat of what an similar experience to what you've been going through which is this combination of um allowing yourself to acknowledge hopefully that you've achieved this on your own terms and put the work in and it's a personal achievement but at the same time it means so much to so many
other people exactly and I don't know I feel like I've been grateful that it's felt so shared cuz a lot of it can feel kind of heavy like carrying first monikers can feel it's too much pressure you know and like I always um I always really fight in any instance in my life where I feel myself being put on a pedestal a bit because it's like nobody should be put on pedestal it's also kind of how your
right is getting back to that house of like yeah your mom probably understanding that it's not really good for the psychology of people to walk around feeling that way about themselves yeah it's not good for them it's not good for anybody around them it's yeah but then again at the same point you know there is a time and a place where acknowledging your growth and where you stand in the moment is really valuable
yeah it is and not to keep like harping bringing it back to community but just um we can talk about Community for the whole conversation if you want cuz I'm all about that but yeah please continue so no the framework that I like talking about cuz it's gaining more track Action Now is there's more published about it from our perspective from Blackfoot perspective one of the biggest sort of uh I guess Frameworks that's used in a
lot of different disciplines is masa's hierarchy of need and um you know the Pinnacle of that being self-actualization like you know having um the base of the pyramid being just your basic Mees net Community Mees all all of that and then with the um end all be all being the actualization of the self but maslo later in his life spent time with um Sika in Canada with black feet people in Canada and spent time
around our world view and the way our societies are structured and from uh working with Blackfoot people what he learned from us was that self-actualization is the starting point like human beings are born self-actualized and that's upheld by your community um and I I mean I felt that growing up it's like when you're when you're in a group you have your elders like talking about you in context of who your family is you know it's like oh
this one comes from a long line of leaders you know introducing you to a group of people immediately who have a sense of yourself in context of your family it's a gift yeah and then when you do have a proclivity for something when you are good at it the way people just like kind of flawn over you for it and like tell you you're doing a good job you know so you grow up like just communally being encouraged to be
exactly who you are my gosh it's kind of odds with some of the experiences I had as a kid not necessarily through the lens of my family who were very supportive of me despite the fact that they couldn't agree about anything um but but uh you know when I went to my own community of peers it was your Absolut a typical John Hughes bullying type environment and it was all it was like no it is like tear each other to
shreds mhm you know it's interesting that um you know we're supposed to be in a situation where where we go to these schools and our parents pay money to go have ties education and it's just chaos right it's just chaos totally no one knows how to act I mean just human nature like we should not be in a pack of kids our own age I agree it's like we're we're just meant to be to rip each other apart our identities aren't formed
and therefore we our job at that moment in time is to take everybody down until we can pick ourselves up yeah starting with our parents yep yep who are old enough and and and strong enough to deal with that but kids can't deal with that right and I mean you just know what it is when you have a sense of self like I remember being really drawn to in any group of people kids immediately younger
than I was and then kids immediately older than me and then there's like this level of kind of taking care of each other I mean I really like the whole Monas approach to education because it keeps multiple ages together in a classroom and the older kids learn better by kind of stewarding and helping the younger kids figure stuff out and then the younger kids feel a sense of belonging and curiy training really is
what absolutely absolutely and that's like you know human beings don't have kids and litters I mean every once in a while you get these outlying mean I know I I know a few couples pop like a box of Pringles you know it's like it's like um last time I saw you falling out and now you have a minivan how's that definitely um so as someone who remains with your feet firmly planted on the ground within the community that
help you guide you nurture you you go home you toot your horn you say I'm home what part of wanting to act wanting to play roles wanting to lean into into art was about Escape maybe um kind of tied to like the the um theory behind I guess um the performance Theory embedded in theater of the oppressed a gusta B Wall's method escaping the world as it is to create a world as you want it to be um like one one uh one example of that recently
that I was really excited about in my film fancy dance which Apple just picked up we'll be out this year I know we stoked yeah me too me too it it found its perfect home um but in that film myself and Isabelle Dy Olen playing auntie and niece Jax and Roi Jax is Raising Roi with um fluent senica kuga in the home and there's several scenes where the two of us are speaking fluently in the language together
and that's kind of Erica tremble our director and uh co-writer of the film her love letter to her language cuz she's putting herself um and was putting herself through a language immersion program at Six Nations she grew up in Oklahoma cuz one of the tribes that was relocated to Oklahoma but still a presence in the north um Northeast but yeah she went up to Canada to to work on the language and that's
kind of where she catched the story for for fancy dance but in you know reality there are only 21 or 22 um first language senica kuga speakers left in the world and they're Elders um there are language immersion programs kind of structured in this sort of like uh self self-directed learning um monory can they possibly get to a place where it's understood to a level and excuse me if this is a naive question where the
elders understand the depth to which the language can go are can you catch up to that with only 21 lift and these programs you know what I mean yeah that's the hope and I think that's a big question of a lot of language vitalization programs cuz if you're not raised with it as a first language um retention is a huge issue with it and I've always um if I hadn't just kind of jumped into being a working actor after
college my other plan was to stay in school maybe bypass the Masters into a PhD study of um merging a performance pedagogy with language vitalization cuz the successful method of it or one of the more successful methods of it is tpr Total Physical response which is you know acting it with your body as you're saying it so it's like you're bringing it to life yeah yeah you're just kind of
steeped in the word with the action so they the two correlate we don't do that enough that's that's so interesting because the amount of times I think about the amount of words I use in my life and then I wonder sometimes like I'll say one thing or someone will say one thing to me and I could tell it carries a meaning that f passes everything else I've said for the last 24 hours and I and I I've got to a point
in my life I'm self-aware enough to know what happened in that moment that made my skin move or made my eyes water or something happen yeah and that's what I love about the additional preparation on top you on top of what you instinctively knew to play this role Molly um I love the conversations you've been having recently about the importance of of this like immersive language training effectively that you had to do in order
to better understand the character yeah cuz i' never heard of that as part of a preparation before it was kind of not strange cuz it actually kind of lived in some of the theory that I wanted to explore with a post-graduate degree but hadn't put into practice um so it's kind of remarkable that in spending a lot of time with oage language I indeed started finding Molly in the language my voice
changed speaking it and I think because my resonance with oage just moved to different places in myself it was um a very physical response and it was very much felt like not me you know um maybe me adjacent somehow because I mean it's I'm the instrument that's playing these notes of Molly yeah but you disappear in that role and and I was going to save this for later I you know great great actors disappear when they take on the
role thank you you just disappear it's incredible it's incredible like I I see I mean Daniel de Lewis is another one I mean you know get some meat on the way out that is not Daniel de Lewis no I met him the butcher that is the Butcher and you expect him to be that cuz it's like he's so terrifying in some of his roles that like have been lightly afraid of him for years but also just completely blown away by him but he's the gentlest
kindest poshest you know not Posh because he's very much of the people he's Posh ly he's he speaks pretty Posh he does speak very Posh but he's very ground yeah very grounded um you know you talked about your answer are about escapism from through the Arts which I'm a big fan of and I think music is for me has always been a perfect balance of learning about myself but also being able to go somewhere else if I need to I
thought you gave such a beautiful answer to that of of perhaps searching and I'm going to botch this but searching you know for for a world that that um that that you wish would would would could be or a reality that's different to the one that you're in and then you find yourself in a role that has changed your life and made you very visible and very recognizable and rewarded that is probably the realest
reminder and kind of the opposite of that almost in a way I just kind of take it all to be a testament that people connected with the film The Way We were hoping and um I feel like Molly's the kind of character that the way I was hoping to build playing her and kind of the way that you know she she was the way that she's written you can um you can revisit this film several times and um still see the journey still feel
attached to the journey and I hope that um I mean I've seen it three times and there it's one of the first times I've experienced watching a film that I'm in and maybe having the same feelings towards my character the audiences W like these senses of the sense of protectiveness this um just hanging on you know waiting to see her come back it's the comfort that I would feel and it's kind of what I felt like honestly
speaking the language you know going back to that it was also kind of physiologically convenient that I figured Molly was probably left-handed um all of her sisters would cross their blankets this way but she would cross her blanket that way so I added that as well having having um the governing like hemisphere of my body that I don't use every day be fully hers yeah which adds to the vulnerability of exactly what
you're trying to achieve and then having the the language which started kind of shaping a bit of the world view for this character you know I I felt protective of her while I was making it to the degree that I didn't want to live in her too long as Lily if that makes sense it does but it's also scary to me for you because Molly lives a lonely life yeah it's lonely and she's steady losing everyone who who's there
for her around her mhm I just think loneliness is the prevailing sentiment of that of that of of Molly within that film and I I wonder whether you felt lonely at times even though I know that you've got a crew around you and the actors are supportive and Marty's supportive but they can't be you being Molly and whether they did feel lonely on set sometimes playing a character that had to carry so much pain and sadness I think what I
felt it particularly the most acutely were the scenes after all of the sisters were gone um like the loss of was I wouldn't say any more traumatic than losing her other sisters losing many felt like a natural thing because nobody really suspected it was an unnatural thing at that time um there was a lot of assumption that these wasting illnesses and which had Afflicted so many oage before people
kind of caught on to it being the reign of terror was um kind of a byproduct being relocated I think also when I felt the most lonely as as Molly was in the presence of uh sh a um her priest when Molly's sitting there and the wasting illness is really like you know the wasting illness her her being poisoned was really starting to take effect and just sitting there with the with her faith with her Rosary with her with her
priest and not being able to express what she thought might be going on and then the getting like shut away shutting herself away in that room I know that Molly had a life after Ernest and had a life after the reign of terror it was um a much different one but one thing that really struck me that marann Bower Marty's archist and co-producer on the film had dug up was that you know I knew that before Molly had passed away the
she was declared competent she was in charge of her own finances so there was that she she also as it turns out went back and um went back after Ernest and there was a period of time where he waso appointed her guardian really a lot of and that was that's something that I think a lot of people miss when they see the film especially on a first watch is how pervasive this guardianship program
was over oage the first moment we meet Molly she's in front of her guardian just asking for her own money yeah it's a powerful scene yep pits Bey um was uh her guardian then so she'd started with pits Bey and then you know one of the things that was appealing about Ernest him being you know this dumb good-look cowboy um entirely unlovable from my point of view wasn't one thing about him I liked I mean you know I get it he had a cheeky
smile and he was he was quicked you know sure and he was you know for her he was upfront about his own like pleasure seeking Hedonism he was simple and it was of benefit for oage people oage women to have a white spouse because then they could be your guardian you didn't have to go through the system going into town go through pits Bey right you could just be like Ernest we need this sign my check so it was you
know appealing to her too there was it wasn't just like oh he's got these pretty blue eyes it's like he's he's kind of a simpleton and he'll do what I tell him to do I mean but the system right the system I keep saying this to to my friends we have conversations about um you know redistribution of of resources wealth all these kind of things I mean I'll talk about about the music industry all the time and I'm like
it's a psychology got to change y you can move the money around all you want they'll give you more money they'll never let the psychology go fully and that's one thing that was so um wonderful for me navigating these moments of as you said intense loneliness that Molly was going through um I had this photo of her as an older woman before she passed away and she didn't live to be a very old woman she
passed away at 50 um but I kept it on the back of my script binder like I had a young picture of her on the front and I had her at the end on the back and she just looked so powerful you know subdued but like at peace happy strong um Victorious and what Maryanne had told me that I just loved is that she actually went back in and sued Ernest for mismanagement of her money when he was her guardian and she got back like 14
Grand something like that and money in those days I don't know what the I don't know what the inflation would be today um and then she also after that went back pit spey too wow cuz he'd skimmed some off the top from her money it doesn't surprise me I mean I think that that um that quiet simmering power is present from the second we see Molly on screen and I think there is but there's some very very difficult scenes I mean one
that really affected me and my wife was the scene where nnest for the first time really sounds off on Molly I think in the bedroom yeah you know and it's all that you know I'm trying to help you now or that sort of really a yep and it's really really awful but what's incredible is and this may get this may cost me my coners my one and only conversation that I ever have with Leo DiCaprio at some point in the future but
it's one of the only times I've ever seen Leo decaprio on screen look like he's rehearsing I'm sorry he just did you shut him down so effectively in that moment that I didn't believe that Leo was Earnest in that moment m because you just absorbed all of it in the most remarkable way I mean it's a compliment to you and I'm sure he would he would accept that cuz it's an incredible scene but I turned to my wife at the end of
the film and I said where do you think that rage went where did where did where did Lily put it at the end of the day because you absorbed it you didn't bounce it back you took it way more powerful than giving it back so how was that can I ask you how that day was that was two days CU um and it I think it turned out that what we ended up using was our first day cuz that was a difficult scene for Leo to crack I mean logically it was
hard for him to understand why he was so angry in that moment there was also at that point in production we hadn't fully cracked how complicit he actually was um in the end you know you see you mean no one was entirely sure how far they were going to take Ernest character into the darkness not at that point and uh so there were several times including that scene where we shot it different ways
cuz we weren't sure what was going to work on screen with the edit wow you can read these historical facts and know what the basic timeline is of things but how do you flush out the humanity that's happening in the margins it's so nuanced and to be going through and actually I I mean I love it I love the idea of creativity in the moment and being so in the moment you're not quite the
character is unveiling itself in real time but what a play seriously a Mary scene if that's what you're doing I mean it's crazy it kind of was and the only thing that was scripted and the only thing that you know Molly was very stubborn in a lot of ways the way a lot of native women are stubborn because we're grounded you know we're immovable and it was so important to me that that scene stay that way cuz it wasn't going
to turn into you know another like you know any other sort of Marty spousal fight scene wasn't going to go there cuz Molly's a different woman than you've seen she's not hysterical she's not going to be like oh my God Karen not at all and then the absorption of it the shutting him out the shutting down to him what I ultimately found in that scene her uh her way of defying I think was just the implication
that she was too dumb to understand what was going on and she's like no I do understand what's going on I just don't trust them but I trust you and that was kind of the the end that's the most heartbreaking part of it is that sinc we're seeing him unfold as you're seeing him unfold and the fact that you're actually deciding in the moment with a small group of people mhm how real this betrayal is going to be right just gives
you so much to to work with because that sense of trusting him which we're all on the screen I mean I'm kind of figuring it out at this point I'm like oh she's got to see this but you get to be that person conflicted by that feeling yeah and um when there are seeds of doubt that start taking root how easy it is to just like unso them um how easy it was for him when he was coming aware of his own complicity
to just kind of continue to go along with it but not let the implications of what he was doing really sink in and I feel like ultimately that whole conversation that the film ends up having is that's really how easy it is what a slippery slope it is to enable these systems is to just keep going along with it yeah and when you look back do you realize he right even when it's not in your own self-interest yeah I'm both sides too that's where the
sympathy for nnest comes in at the end is you realize that he went too far and realize he couldn't go back right and uh didn't really click for him fully until he'd lost someone too like for the first time losing his daughter I remember um my mom she said I know this is horrible to say but when you watch him get the news that baby Anna has died in the way that it hits him she's like good finally
he feels it finally he feels something that scene that you're talking about were the last little moments before she started getting these injections and before really her subconscious mind Got Hijacked by being manipulated so much and the family's pretty much worked out that that cocktail she was getting she was getting insulin and she was one of the first five people in the world to get it so it was fully plausible from
in the world and this was back when insulin was um just kind of being tested on people it had just been developed in Toronto um Molly was in some ways a bit of a guinea pig but a wealthy enough guinea pig that she could afford these treatments but it the family in talking with her grandchildren have pretty much decided it was a mixture of Arsenic and morphine along with it the Arsenic obviously to to kill her the morphine to
kind of curb the um sensation of what the Arsenic would be doing and and and consequently also addicting her to the whole process you know as an actor having to play something I was playing you know you find ways to play the Arsenic you know the um neurological damage it does like flapping is something a lot of people with arsenic poison experience not being able to hold on to things um you know the intense
sickness um just completely erodes your your nervous system but then the morphine and particularly the morphine addiction was where I was able to transer some of that not lack of Suspicion but that distorted relationship with Ernest onto because every time he shows up she gets her hit Everything feels better otherwise it's not realistic for us we're like otherwise we start to potentially turn a
little on Molly like well right and I think some audiences do have that experience but there's so much that was just up in it yeah and also let's not forget when Dao does the devil yeah Dao does the devil you you feel the temperature change in the room when he's in character for sure for sure because the devil the idea of evil incarnate through human form is something that people overplay it's such a it's such a fun
character I'm sure to play and and effective from a role point of view that you s overdo it and what's so good about Dao doing it is that you know it's he's right in front of you the whole whole time absolutely yep and uh you know the real hail um oage cut him out of photos like for a long time people wouldn't even talk about him almost as if you'd spoke his name and you'd summon him sort of a thing do you think he knows he's
he's doing the devil's work or do you think he's doing God's work that's the thing I think that's what makes it so evil is ER or uh hail in this role I've not seen a character embody Manifest Destiny so fully so fully and that's it it's feeling entitled by God you know self-appointed himself King of the oage hills imposing this hierarchy onto oage people it wasn't enough to go for oil money oil wealth go for indigenous lives
he was also learning the language as he but because then it's generational wealth then you're making money generationally yep right yep he like in a lot of ways seemed like he wanted to be o Sage yeah I thought that too and it's interesting he does he that's the weirdest thing about his his whole entire role in this is that throughout it the only thing that's believable is that he genuinely does somewhere in his
heart have some kind of I don't know if it's love or if it's just admiration or respect or obsession with the people yeah and you actually see that globally a lot in nationalism this weird fetishization of indigeny um it's somehow this claiming of absolute right to the land is it a savior complex in some respect like an extreme version an obsessive version of a savior complex yeah a savior complex while also
completely absorbing and adopting the the romanticized version you have of who these people are for yourself oh wow a romanticized version of who these people are for yourself complete lack of self-awareness mhm full projection yep I mean you see it manifest today I talked about it recently with Super Bowl last week there was this um I forget the name of the author Carl Mark maybe um he wrote this
character the Apache Warrior winnu he's a German author who wrote winu in the late 1800s and that created this big cultural Obsession in Germany over um indigenous people over native people uh you see little little references of it um I guess most famously now like in in glorious bastards like there's a reference to winnu in there winnu was Hitler's favorite book he loved winnu um this sort of nationalistic view of the self as being
like coming from the land being the the inherent like owners of it this um fantasy of just being this great Brave you know fighting to to keep your land fighting to keep your culture it's like that's really appealing to a lot of people with nationalistic sort of proclivity well it leads to huge levels of unrealistic self-righteousness oh absolutely absolutely it's like what can I do with my own psyche what can I adopt
and cherry pick and Adorn myself with that gives me absolute impunity to do whatever the I want and that was very much hail strange strange times look I'm having the best time same I'm having the best time I had another volent F record lined up just in case this was a terrible interview but I can do away with it um I'm a big fan of letting go I think that I don't know what the meaning of life is beyond love
and family and the sharing of of of and memories but if I was going to put in language I think let go is probably the closest thing I can get to cuz that's how we enter this world we're we're lucky enough that someone lets go and we arrive and then if we leave you got to kind of let go one way or the other and so I think it's kind of somewhere in the middle we we do a lot of good work
trying to hold on but I meant to let him go um so I say that to say that that much has been said about this kind of idea this this this kind of pivotal moment when you know feels to me like you're about to just let go and just like hey I'm cool like I did it I worked at it I got myself to a place where I appreciate the craft and the work I did and I know the craft but I'm going to go do something else I'm interested in it's
not I'm not throwing in any towel here I'm just interested in this too and then life changes and comes back is it too simplistic to say that you would let go no I think I've gotten very very good at letting go yeah I think being a career actor means that you have to get good at it or you're just going to go insane I mean I'm in my late 30s experiencing this breakthrough um God no one knows
what to do with it under the age of 25 I am so grateful for that I am so grateful for that except for Billy ish respect to her but everyone else has no idea yeah Billy's just a spirit she welled all her family have done and I say this with pure confidence because I know them really well as guided her natural spirit and wisdom into the world done right by her you can see that she's yeah she's a little Angel um but yeah I think uh
letting go of expectation that anything is going to go your way is crucial to have a career as an actor yeah so when you're being told by people and I love the story that you know um and I also love manifestation but not without work and gratitude right and the idea of of of you know manifestation isn't just like a one-way Road man it's all sorts of lefts and rights you have to take back and forth back and forth but I love
the idea of like hey you're most likely to get an Oscar okay cool I'm young I have no idea what that means and then you just begin your journey and I wonder this is hopefully the most trite question I can ask you but if there were times when during that Journey when you loved the work but recognized that the world wasn't necessarily unveiling itself in the way that that others had seen you in high school with with a term
like that becomes whether you look at it and listen to it and feel it differently cuz you're like well yeah but that's not how it's working yeah and I think I kind of started out on that foot honestly I didn't get cast that much in main stage Productions or in stage Productions when I wasn't undergrad but my classwork was great like always getting incredible feedback um loving the scene work I was
doing with my classmates like very much confident that what I was doing was good but then when it came to Casting it just for some reason wasn't happening I think people who want to go cuz the idea of being an actor or being in film or or TV or theater is so the idea of pure expression and playing roles is so beautiful but I always feel for actors in the biggest way and I tell you why because as someone who has been in love
with music my whole life I know there are that musicians often feel unheard mhm yep and unseen yep you release music into the world and it sits and it has to wait sometimes for a long time for anyone recognize it so it feels unseen but actors are seen and rejected right that is a whole other muscle you got to grow yep and I think you develop a really good sense of self and relationship into the work where
gratefully I had enough experience where I was have been on the other side of the casting table so I could feel what it felt like to love an actor love their performance love their talent but no they weren't right for the role and that helped me depersonalize it as well but yeah I I feel like I've always held a little bit of a light grip on it um but love it so much one of the big reasons I didn't after I graduated didn't move to
LA or New York cuz I could kind of feel that if I had tried that young it would have killed my love for it pretty quickly i' already like gone through that gamut with ballet and like I really still miss having that that form of expression in my life but it's it's kind of a brutal one and it killed my love of movement or Love of Dance anyways when I was pretty young why what what happened within that experience because people
talk about dance being such a personal expression I feel like acting can be but you would Thing dance is incredibly personal but it can be so competitive in a way that acting isn't even competitive in a very um nonverbal but very palpable how dare you perit like that at me exactly um and it's just like I'm just doing me you know um especially like free form dance or modern it's still there I was
expecting maybe without the rigidity of ballet training it would go away but it almost gets worse but you're right it's like your form of expression is not as good as my form of expression and I don't even feel like music really like that I mean every now and then at a Grammy someone might go my album's better than your album And the fact you won that pisses me right off but I mean it's rare that musicians will allow
themselves to actually openly at least be competitive about each other's art but you're saying that in dance you experienced it being quite as a pretin anyway and then in a few cases as an adult like when you have people that you really can just fluidly move with there's nothing like it and it's fantastic and I do find that rarer when I've gone and ventured into the dance world world than when I've acted cuz
when you work with an actor that you have that fluidity with it's just magic you know like you're just gliding through life I think it's essential as an actor and this is definitely a Daniel de Lewis thing too who like famously cobbles shoes in between you know just find something that he's interested in and one of the first lessons I got I guess in undergrad was to um from Jillian Campana my one of my first
professors is to just stay invested and stay interested in the world cuz that makes you interesting curiosity everything mhm you got to have something to draw from you got to have something to be inspired by I think there's I don't know what the equivalent would be like you know how boxers get cauliflower ear I think some actors get some version of cauliflower ear you can see it you can see that it's like they've just been
taking the same blow over and over without enough breaks and also I think I think lifestyle plays a role too and I mean we're all we're all totally capable of this but stuff is stuff when you start getting stuff then it's like oh man I just just got to keep the stuff yep you know that that role will let me get that stuff yeah and I've toyed with those thoughts myself some auditions you have come in where you have to really
ask yourself okay it's not about the thought because a lot of times the first thought is I'm not right for this role but I'm still going to submit for it you know that's like 90% of it 97% of it and every once in a while you get that role that comes in that you're like I might actually get this and then you think about the implication of what it would have on your life in a bigger way yeah
well I'm thinking about this even in relation to the film because it's it's so fascinating that as soon as you realize and I love how the idea of of um mineral wealth is presented within the within the nation very quickly we're not sitting there like what do we do with this money it's just like here's the oil here's the wealth let's get this story going and it's interesting that just like all of us it was worn it was driven
and it was owned MH and I I've left that film wondering whether the oage even had a choice that that's just what money does it just moves with the system you know you see Capital Express itself in a very indigenous way when you're around o AG which was an interesting part of the cultural acclimation coming in from being up north um where we don't have this deeper culture of money and um I mean oage have been trading with the
French forever so there was already a pretty acute understanding of how the white man thought about wealth um which is partly why I think they had the foresight of buying their reservation CU they knew they wouldn't be moved if they bought it that's what the white man respected and then of securing the surface mineral rights like just knowing that the actual tangible land and that's a very indigenous worldview you know
what you can touch what you can see what you can interact with let's also protect that we're not just protecting this imaginary boundary we're protecting the physical tangible God you think you've done enough at that point then you realize that okay well let's poison you then yeah yep I mean it's absolutely insane the length at which you know people will go to sincerely but what you do see with oage
and you see it expressed differently there because of this Legacy of inheritance um but also there aren't as many oage as you would think today who have head rights those head rights are largely with oil corporations with churches with banks because they were used as collateral for loans with non oages who procured them through means like you see in the film and unfortunately like to protect individual
identity you don't know who individually owns oage head rights that can't be public knowledge but when it's like a when it's a bank when it's a church when it's you know then then that's that's um tell yeah when you're there it's um well for example the dishes in the dinner scene where Molly is feeding Ernest the first time and giving him as 20 questions and figuring him out those are dishes from the red corn family that
have been in the family since the 1920s and feed everybody every year so there's not this accumulation of every year the newest dish set here's what we got with our oil wealth that's in the family and it's stay in the family every year and when we were filming with it and the year after because you know holding it for re-shoot or whatever there were a couple years where the red corns rented
their dishes for the first time in 100 years for for the feeds in the summer and then like you also see you know the finest sort of like Pendleton wools and like these blankets that people get when you get gifted it it will still have the tag on it you keep the tag on it because eventually you're going to regift it so it's like the currency of These Fine things that are accumulated they gain wealth the more they're passed around
the more stories they get on them the more people who have passed hands the more they're gifted the more their value goes up so it's um and you see that worldview with money and a lot of indigenous folks like a potlatch Society folks from Pacific Northwest it's um displays of wealth are ex are um expressed in displays of generosity not of hoarding like when you're a rich person you can brag on your wealth by
how much you're giving away versus how much like you're exactly and Native people were just like that you know you got to be careful around native people if you if you Fawn too much over like their cool hat and you talk about how much you like their hat they might just take it off their head and give it to you it's that's so be warn I mean like right I think that is the definition of killing with kindness I really think it is it
kind of is it kind of is it's like well if you want it so much your weirdo just have it right pretty much but graciously of course and then you got to wear it no for sure for sure very gracious but also with with beautiful nuances and layers of um you're just not there yep you're just not there yet yep and I'm fine with this caught myself with that several times with people too especially coming
back in from this world where I'm getting gifted so much stuff I'm like developing this deep curiosity as I get older in my life um and talking to you just it just is so much amazing uh curiosity and you apply yourself to the world obviously in a very open way which I'd imagine as we established kept you company and kept you safe and kept you confident and warm in those moments when um you had way more curios in the
business that that you were trying to get into it's like that's dealing with some rubbish so so so I can imagine that at this point now that you know because with a role like this and a performance like this all of a sudden you have an ability to be able to express your curiosity in the system and I can imagine that must be probably outside of the impact of the film and what it means to to to the people and to the community
and to the people who need to know more the most rewarding thing is that now you actually rather than to run out there and take these roles and get stuff you get to say what do I do with this is that is that where you are yeah pretty much cuz there is an abundance of things coming my way um and I'm definitely not the only person out here doing what I'm doing yeah it's also really exciting to see
that when you do feel passionate about something like bringing it up now people are listening in a bigger way you know the film itself is such a testament to um how much these stories that we've been told for a long time or too Niche or too like esoteric or whatever that aren't going to appeal universally are doing that like the the response that people have had not just killers of the flower moon but like res
dogs you know it's um not a highly like awarded show it's been kind of snubbed by Major Awards bodies but it's been the number one show on a ton of lists and it's uh you know an absolute Testament to how hungry audiences are for our voices for our storytelling and I think um now that the proofs and the pudding with things like that with Killers it makes it kind of a no-brainer that fancy dance would land
at Apple that a lot of these stories that maybe we've been pitching in rooms for years and years now it's like oh wait what was that show let's bring that back around well what's beautiful as well is that you find one person who sees the true value in it mhm and is willing to commit to it yeah that's all it takes coresi I mean exactly you know we all love the gangster films and we all love the musicals and we I love the
you know when he dives into music and works with the band or the stones I'm like man no one does music like you Mar you know I've met him it's okay I think I can call him Marty I think I can call him Mar I've been told it's weird not to yeah yeah exactly but I truly believe that um he is a patron of the Untold Story yeah you know and I and I love that he he did this and I guess a nice way to finish is in the spirit of giving is to
just talk a little bit about what the experience was like with him and ultimately beyond the result the film and what how it's changing your life and ours what you ultimately feel is is is is most special in your experience of working with with Martin sces I mean old sage call on Marty now if that tells you a little bit um he uh he's the oldest 20-year-old I know he's got so much energy he's got so much
curiosity he just like he's up and like all right new day what are we doing what are we doing you know just constantly and [Music] um one thing that I really am touched by with him is that uh you associate these folks who have the kind of name that just gets things made or the kind of name that just like you know everybody can somehow get behind like Martin Scorsese you would assume that there
must be some kind of um really difficult or uh or unique sort of um ego that goes along with that when you're with him and when you're creating with him what you see and what's so refreshing is that ego is fully committed to the peace it's like the self is set aside in service of what the art is wishing but the alar of the art absolutely and he does that so clearly you know he um he's so good-natured about and maybe it's
because he's been doing this for his whole life and it's the wisdom that age brings you and experience brings you he also seems to hold a lot of things with a light hand he knows when he needs it he knows most of the time exactly how to get it he also knows that some scenes that maybe he's not fully aware of how to get he lets the actors tell him what's going on in the scene and then he'll kind of start shaping and
orchestrating with it he's truly collaborative in that way um maybe it is a little bit like a band he's the Maestro but like he he definitely plays with who he wants to play with and he brings on people that he knows will hit certain things in my conversation with him I really felt that I felt that he moves with the Rhythm and dynamic dnic of a musician in a band very much you can see why a lot of his enduring
friendships are with musicians and um I mean God I my dad actually when we go back to the beginning of the conversation talking about formative music Robbie Robertson was so formative for me I was back I was a little dancer still and I was doing a lot of choreographing my own pieces and I just loved choreographing to the Red Road Ensemble when Robbie kind of like bridged into his music and his identity and just like
um I loved that album so much and my dad I remember it didn't mean a whole lot to me back then cuz like you know I wanted to be an actor but I was thinking like stage wasn't like really into films yet I liked movies but it wasn't like other than wanting to be an Ewok I wasn't all about being on camera um so dad was trying to explain to me who Martin scorsi was in the context of his friendship with Robbie Robertson by the
way just why I please hold that thought one of the greatest most underrated character actor studies of all time the Ewok thank you absolutely it needs to come back in a major way Perfect Balance perfect balance between cute animal cute pit and human and fish and vicious and all of it right I mean my dog is an ewok I call my dog in Ewok literally looks like an Ewok anyway so please your thought so yeah theater yeah um well my
dad was when he was explaining to me who Martin scorsi was it was in reference to his friendship with Robbie Robertson and he said yeah Marty makes this movie this movie this movie and you know those kind of movies scared me at that age but um I just remember having this image in my head of like him sitting in the basement with Robbie Robertson watching movies together CU my dad was told me about that part of their friendship so I had
his name hanging in my head and then kundun came out and that was the first film of his that I saw I saw it with my dad I think my dad um the free toet movement really held like a special place for my dad there's so many parallels postc colonialism um um but we watched that together and like that's what defined Marty as a filmmaker for me and you know talking about like capturing this period of time and seeing
a world as it may have been that we can't access anymore and how like touching that was and then my dad I had to remind him of this he'd completely forgotten but he told me then um partly because of the proximity and friendship to Robbie Robertson that you know one day Marty's going to make his Indian movie and it's going to be like this you know talking about kundun so when um it did come back around I remember having
to kind of like a couple of people were worried about it being a good Fellas you know being like a a murder tour through the reign of terror I was like but Marty also made kundun so it could be and dad said it's going to be fine yep dad was like it's going to be fire how can you how can you not believe in magic how can people not believe in magic mhm thank you Lily thank Us in it's been lovely