Beyond the many big names of Killers of the Flower Moon, beyond the Oscar-front-running revelation that is Lily Gladstone, one performance sticks out in Martin Scorsese’s 1920s epic from an actor most of us had never seen before: Cara Jade Myers. That’s not for lack of trying. Myers is one of many Native talents in Hollywood who have been waiting a very long time to be able to show what they can do. In her decade-plus of trying to make it as a screen actor, she’d booked a handful of background roles, a pair of small TV guest spots on This Is Us and Rutherford Falls. But by and large, the roles were not there. The auditions were not there. She felt ready to call it quits and transition to writing when, out of the blue, she received the chance to try out for a breakout on a scale that anyone would dream for.
Watching Killers, it’s no surprise Myers booked the part—her time in the film is relatively brief but searingly memorable. She plays Anna Brown, whose murder prods the Osage tribe to gather and try to fight back, as their community faces an insidious genocide perpetrated by their white neighbors. Myers’s heartbreaking portrayal of Anna, sister to Gladstone’s Mollie, resonates in its humanity: She imbues her with a big personality, a profound depth of feeling, and a tragic sense of loss, her alcoholism worsening as her family dies off, one by one. This does not feel like the performance of an actor in her first true movie role. She holds her own against the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro and makes the most of every minute onscreen.
Now, Myers is on the awards trail with the top awards contender, itself a very new experience. I caught her during a rare break over Zoom in New York, the morning after the film received a rousing tribute at the Gotham Awards.
Vanity Fair: I understand that the process of booking this role was very emotional for you. Can you talk a little bit about that to start?
Cara Jade Myers: I auditioned for this first in 2019, and I hadn’t really booked anything. I had done This Is Us and Rutherford Falls, which were both costar [credits]. I hadn’t really done much on anything, and I was like, Well, I’ve been doing this since I was 22. That’s 15 years. I was like, Obviously acting just isn’t for me. I thought I’d just focus on writing because I’d been in a few writing workshops by then. Then, this audition came in November 2019, and I remember not thinking I would get it at all. When I did finally book it, it was December of 2020. It was just emotional because it’s something that I’ve been working toward for so long. I love it, and I was ready to give up on it. It just felt like all the hard work that I’d done, all the meetings and all the stress and struggle that I put my family through trying to pay for acting—at that moment, it felt like it was all worth it.
How did you experience the industry before that point, particularly as a Native actor? Given that level of difficulty you’re describing, what kinds of things specifically were you running into in terms of not being able to book things?
The only auditions I was getting was Native American roles. Which is fine, but also, Native American roles come by so rarely. It seemed like they would always book the same three people. You felt just typecast. You couldn’t do anything else but be a Native American, which I’m like—that’s not a role! That’s just a part of an identity. And also, it was just roles for women. I remember reading a casting notice that said, “The woman doesn’t need any acting experience. She’s a prop to the man.” That’s literally what the casting said, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to start writing. I was like, We can do better.