The Big Picture
- Lily Gladstone’s range widens after the spotlight directed her way during the last awards season, thanks to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’
- The Hulu limited series ‘Under the Bridge’ explores the murder of Reena Virk and showcases Gladstone’s depth in portraying Cam.
- Gladstone discusses feeling a personal connection to Virk’s story, shedding layers in her role, and her upcoming slate of projects.
[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Under the Bridge.]
Lily Gladstone is a force. With each character she plays in each project she does, she has something to say and she makes her mark. As her opportunities continue to expand, especially after the spotlight that was on her during the last awards season, for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the range she’s able to showcase widens even further. And to think, she almost quit acting and gave it all up, but thankfully for us, she didn’t.
In the Hulu limited series Under the Bridge, based on the book about the 1997 true crime case of 14-year-old Reena Virk, local police officer Cam Bentland (Gladstone) finds her path crossing with Rebecca Godfrey (Riley Keough), a novelist who has returned to her hometown and finds herself drawn into the world of the teen suspects. As shocking discoveries about how Reena went to a party that she never returned home from continue to reveal themselves, Cam and Rebecca reconnect, revealing that past wounds aren’t entirely healed in the present.
During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Gladstone talked about why she connected to Reena Virk’s story, why she wanted to work with Keough, how she always likes to go as deep as possible with the characters she plays, shedding Cam’s layers throughout the season, and shooting the intimate moment between Cam and Rebecca. She also discussed what it’s like to actually have a place now for the stories that she fits into, what it’s like to really widen the net of diversity for the projects she’s involved in, and what she has lined up next.
Under the Bridge (2024)
Reena Virk, a fourteen-year-old girl went to join friends at a party and never returned home. Seven teenage girls and a boy were accused of the savage murder.
- Release Date
- April 17, 2024
- Cast
- Riley Keough , Izzy G , Chloe Guidry , Ezra Faroque Khan , Archie Panjabi , Vritika Gupta , Javon Walton , Aiyana Goodfellow , Lily Gladstone , Anoop Desai
- Seasons
- 1
- Streaming Service(s)
- Hulu
Collider: I was so compelled by this series and the dual performance that you and Riley Keough give in it. When this came your way, were you aware of this real-life story? Is it something you knew about in passing? Did you not know about it at all?
LILY GLADSTONE: I’m sorry, I inhaled my spit when I was going to answer your question. Man, that evolutionary tick that puts our windpipe right next to where our food goes, it’s so stupid. Anyway, I was not explicitly aware of Reena Virk and her case, but I think I definitely felt like that when I was that age. I moved from Montana to Seattle in the sixth grade, in 1997. I was essentially in middle school, my last year of elementary school, when this happened, very much pre-teen. There was suddenly some sort of cultural shift, at the year’s end and in the coming years, and particularly two years later when Columbine happened. I just remember, oddly, thinking it was funny at the time, but it gave me some context, that there was this weird preoccupation that adults had with what kind of music we were listening to, particularly making sure that we weren’t idolizing the whole Crip/Blood war that was going on. Vancouver Island is so close to where I was in school. I feel like the northern states and the Pacific Northwest maybe caught a little bit of the cultural shift, but I think it was happening in the States anyway.
It wasn’t long after that, that we had Matthew Shepard here, and in Canada, Reena Virk is as big of a recognizable name and case as Matthew Shepard is in the States. I do not explicitly remember Reena, but I do remember the culture of being a young teenager at that time, when suddenly adults were getting very concerned about the music that we were listening to and the video games we were playing. I’m sure that’s always been there, but it was garnering a lot of conversation, and I just remember feeling like that was unfair back then, before I was sophisticated enough to grasp some of the conversations around it. I think that’s when people got hyper-obsessed with putting that mature warning on music. I feel like what I have learned is that Reena Virk is very well known in Canada, especially in B.C., and her case changed a lot of the ways that missing persons cases are conducted and that missing persons reports are filed, especially in the earliest days. I know it had an impact, whether or not I explicitly knew it.
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When you approach something like this, how deep do you go? Do you focus on the character, who she is, her role in the story, and her relationships? Do you also want to dig into the book? Do you want to get a better understanding of the police force? Do you want to dig even deeper into issues of societal injustice and justice system failures and race? How deep were the layers that you wanted to go with this?
GLADSTONE: What was nice is that those layers were there. I always want to go as deep as possible with the character and what they’re saying. In my first meeting with Quinn [Shephard] and Samir [Mehta], to suss out what kind of true crime this would be, there were a lot of concerns I had inherently. But knowing that Riley was attached is part of what made me take the meeting at all, especially knowing that she was attached, not just to act in it, but to produce it. Riley and I developed a social media friendship years ago. We were struggling to remember when we actually met in person recently because we’ve known each other online for a minute now. It was 2018 when we started interacting, and in a pretty meaningful way for a social media relationship. There were a lot of tap backs and a lot of emojis, but also a lot of amplifying posts that I would make, particularly on her part, when I only had a few thousand followers. I knew the kind of things that she cared about and I just loved her work.
So, when I was having the first meeting with Quinn and Samir, inherently just at a glance, just seeing that the character was an Indigenous cop that was adopted by her family, I wrote down a bunch of notes about, “Okay, is this gonna be explored? And is this gonna be explored?” In that meeting, I had pretty much every note on my list with the hope that, if it wasn’t explicitly in the script, these folks would be the kind of people that would incorporate that into the script. That’s usually how I take meetings, especially playing characters that are so loaded in stories that are so loaded. But before I could even ask any questions, I was just crossing off everything on my list. They had thought so deeply about the formation of Cam, about the story, about the sources that they optioned – because it wasn’t just Under the Bridge, it was also Manjit’s memoir about the family’s experience leading up to what happened to Reena and through the trial. Those elements were incorporated and acknowledged, with the way the characters interact with each other, representing these entities that sensationalized or dismissed too quickly what was going on. It was nice.
As an actor, I got to know that the deep dive was already there. Then, I could focus on a character who was essentially conditioned to be a character that didn’t authentically fit her. Her authentic voice came from this very compassionate place of having been a child that went through the system and of not having a solid sense of her origin, but having this internal compass pointing towards something that is evading her, given the environment that she was brought up in and given the expectations placed upon her and that she places upon herself. I got to, in a way, develop a skin that Cam wears, essentially as an identity that she almost performs because she’s expected to be a certain way. It was interesting to know that I would have a way, as an actor, to start shedding that and to start letting that internal voice that she had, that was grounded in what I knew was going to be a very deep dive into who she was.
Just knowing that the story and all those elements were there, I could just do my job and focus on the human that I was playing. I got to grow and develop a subconscious life for her. That’s what made her good at her job in the first few episodes. And then, as her subconscious is coming into focus more and she’s seeing herself more clearly in Reena, she also starts to see herself in Dusty. Her moral compass gets more finely tuned and it’s circumstantial, or maybe just the way the world works and the design of the system she was born into and put through and ultimately lands in. That’s a very specific arc and movement. There’s a Fibonacci to it, and this case has the same thing. This case follows a lot of the same patterns and is grounded in a lot of the same things. Of course, in unearthing what really happened to Reena, Cam finds out about who she is and learns about her own origin. Being the only fictional character, getting a chance to have that arc and have that conversation and really shed that skin, you notice it happening physically, too. Throughout the series, more and more of the uniform comes off and Cam wears it less frequently. It’s not wearing her anymore. That was something that I was really looking forward to, just as an actor, because I knew those conversations were there and I just had to be present with the way the other characters were created. I had this, not dual personality, but these layers to shed. That’s what was nice. You always build layers into a character, but you don’t often get the chance, over the course of an arc of eight episodes, to shed them and take them off.
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Your character and Riley’s character have this history, but they also have a pretty shaky present. How did you approach that relationship, especially for the intimate scene that you guys have together? Did you talk about their dynamic at all, or did you want to just find that on the day?
GLADSTONE: There’s an immediacy that’s really lovely about not overthinking and not over rehearsing when it comes to things like that. Also, there’s the benefit of choreography and making sure that everybody’s comfortable and taken care of, for intimate scenes. And then, it’s light and fun and silly. I think it’s such a loaded relationship that goes back to some really traumatic and unresolved things for both characters, that happened very much in adolescence. The two of them being thrust back together over such a case brings both of them back to that place. It’s a little bit inevitable. They’re suddenly, in a way, teenagers again because it’s unresolved and that’s where the rift happened. That’s where this shared tragedy really still affects Rebecca daily and was very big for Cam and the source of some of their rift.
I thought it was a really interesting way that both of our characters are represented in the meta of the story and the larger scope. Rebecca has been brought out from behind the page and made an accountable character with a perspective about this case and with bias about this case, in conversation with Cam. Even though they’re both investigating and seemingly looking for the same thing, they have such incredibly different ways in, and incredibly different perspectives about what’s unfolding. Quinn said that it boils down to Rebecca being able to recognize herself in the kids that committed [this crime], and Cam recognizes herself in Reena and ultimately also in Dusty.
If those two characters didn’t have some magnetic, unresolved, and very close relationship, then it would have been just a pointing finger, shouting match conversation of these two larger entities that we represent, not actually having a full conversation. I thought that tension was necessary and really rewarding. It’s a compelling chemistry, for sure. They didn’t know that they had so much unresolved between the two of them and certainly didn’t know that this was the thing that was gonna bring them back together. She’s like, “Why are you doing this? This is a weird way to try to reinsert yourself into my life.” Rebecca didn’t have that agenda. It’s happenstance, but you know how loaded it is, if that even comes into question. It was something nice to chew on.
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What has it been like for you to go from not being sure you could do acting as a career to having meetings now with tons of directors and possible future collaborators? Does it ever feel challenging to find that balance between the artistic and the creative, and then the business and the industry side of it?
GLADSTONE: I think I’m just such a specific performer and there’s a place for the kind of stories that I fit into now, in a way that there hasn’t been for a lot of the rest of my career, but in a way that I trust it would be there anyway. I followed paths that felt right at the time, and I feel like now is just the time. It’s really exciting, but it’s not just exciting, it’s a dream. It’s ideal to get to be part of a continuing evolution of the kind of stories that are told, but also to see proof that people are really hungry for our stories, and they’re hungry for our representation and broader narratives. For such a long time, Native actors in projects and Native characters in the stories have just not been told by us. We’ve been fulfilling the same sort of conversation that somebody else is making a comment about, and we really get to speak for ourselves now. In doing so, it’s been really nice to see how, when you can speak for yourself, people immediately know how to relate to you. They’re not just guessing about it. You suddenly aren’t this exotic, unreachable, or unengageable entity in people’s minds. You’re a human being. You have commonalities.
What I’m experiencing is that I just get to be seen as a performer, for what I get to do. I hope that continues to be the experience for a lot of the other Indigenous actors who are out there. I’m really happy to see, for example, Forrest Goodluck. He’s somebody who’s been able to do that, too. He’s getting approached for roles that aren’t explicitly Native, but him being Native infuses that character with something lovely. He’s also just a great performer to watch and he does interesting things. I think it’s gonna continue to evolve that way. I’m just excited that I’m getting approached for genre pieces now that are fun. I got pitched an action movie not long ago. I have an ensemble farcical romantic comedy (The Wedding Banquet) coming up that’s a remake of a great nineties film. It’s our time, and it’s really exciting.
Lily Gladstone Is Excited That Her Full Plate Is a Diverse, Well-Balanced Meal
What do you hope to film this year? Do you know what the next thing is that you might be doing, or are you still sorting out scheduling?
GLADSTONE: I’m starting production on said farcical ensemble comedy (The Wedding Banquet) very soon. I’m returning to Vancouver to do it. And then, after that, weather depending, because everybody’s in search of snow these days, I’ve got a dream of dreams where I’ll be working with another very beautiful, intuitive, incredible, compelling woman director, Reed Morano, on an adaptation by my favorite screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman. Charlie has written several of my favorite films, and this one is really astounding. The Memory Police has been announced, and it’s filming a little later this year, after said farce. And there are a couple of projects that I’m making with friends and that I’m making with people that I’ve worked with before. I tend to work with the same directors, over and over again. I’ve got a project that’s premiering at Tribeca. Me and Morrisa [Maltz] are gonna be there with Jazzy. We’re also gonna be collaborating on something we’re both really excited about. We’re gonna start picking up little things, here and there, and we’ll announce it when it makes sense to announce it, but that’s very much in motion. There are a couple of series I’m developing with some good friends that are doing great things in TV right now. It’s busy. I know it’s all gonna work out. I don’t feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I’m excited that I’m looking at a full plate that’s very diverse. It’s a well-balanced meal, for the next few years.
Under the Bridge is available to stream on Hulu. Check out the trailer:
This article was originally published on collider.com