Lily Gladstone Had Three Requirements Before Agreeing to Play an Indigenous Woman Cop in ‘Under the Bridge’: ‘It’s Almost the Only Role We Get to See’
variety.comSelome Hailu There aren’t enough Native women on TV. But when they do get hired, they’re often playing cops. “Not to take away from the performances of all these actresses, who I admire so much and are doing a beautiful job,” says Lily Gladstone, “but it’s almost the only role that we get to see.” So it’s understandable that Gladstone had something of a checklist in hand when she first met with the producers of “Under the Bridge.” They were offering her the role of Cam Bentland, a police officer investigating the 1997 murder of Reena Virk (played by Vritika Gupta), a 14-year-old child of Indian immigrants in Saanich Core, British Columbia.
Cam, a Native woman adopted by a family of white cops, was the invention of series creator Quinn Shephard. Though realistic, the character is fictional; but the homicide at the center of the project is not.
Often in the true crime genre, “it’s the victims who become the most marginalized in their story all over again,” says Gladstone.
She needed to know that wasn’t going to happen before she could get involved in the project. Shephard had written Cam with Gladstone in mind after seeing her in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 film “Certain Women” — the same role that inspired Martin Scorsese to cast her in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” And there’s another crucial commonality the Scorsese film has with “Under the Bridge.” “Killers” was based on a book by journalist David Grann about the Reign of Terror in 1920s Osage County, Okla., but “I had seen the success of also optioning a book that underwrote the whole story,” Gladstone says.
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