Lily Gladstone on ‘Under the Bridge,’ MMIW Awareness, and Radical Empathy

After an awards season that saw Lily Gladstone scoop up a Golden Globe and a SAG Award for her astonishing work as Mollie Burkhart in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the actor has moved swiftly on to her next project: Hulu’s limited series Under the Bridge, based on the best-selling true-crime book by Rebecca Godfrey.

In it, Gladstone plays Cam Bentland, an Indigenous policewoman determined to solve the missing-person turned homicide case of Reena Virk, an Indo-Canadian 14-year-old girl, in the late 1990s. Badly bullied at her school in ultra-white Victoria, Reena falls in with a local group of teens who style themselves the “Crip Mafia Cartel” before she’s discovered dead.

Initially, the story gave her pause. “After Killers of the Flower Moon, seeing another true-crime piece, I leaned away a little bit,” Gladstone tells Vogue via Zoom. (While Reena’s story is very real, Cam Bentland is an amalgamation.) “Seeing an Indigenous woman cop, I thought, That’s a really huge chunk of the representation you have onscreen for Indigenous actresses. I think I, [like] a lot of performers, hope that there’s room to expand and grow and contextualize the character.”

Yet the involvement of Riley Keough in the project captured Gladstone’s attention. “I knew there was something about it she really believed in, and I feel like Ri does incredibly empathetic, very smart deep dives into things,” she says. The two had been Instagram friends for a long time, and, besides admiring Keough’s career, Gladstone had been taken by her support of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) awareness. In the series, Keough plays author Rebecca Godfrey, who returns to her small Canadian hometown from a bustling life in New York to write a book about the area’s scourge of missing girls. What she finds there, however, is a much darker story. While most murder mysteries have a clear villain, Under the Bridge considers how vulnerable young girls can themselves become assailants.

“One of the big things that was important to me was to feel like Under the Bridge took a self-aware approach to the way that culture tends to commodify tragedy like this into content,” Gladstone says. “Having the radio show at the end of Killers of the Flower Moon, and then Marty [Scorsese] signing off, was like drawing himself into the narrative as the storyteller who has the perspective and puts his signature on it in a very self-indicting way. I feel like that was similar to what was happening by bringing Rebecca [Godfrey] into the narrative.”