March 12, 2024
People, culture, Awards,
Warning: This article discusses details from Killers of the Flower Moon.
In Martin Scorcese’s western crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon, Cara Jade Myers has eight minutes and 55 seconds of total screen time. It’s just a sliver of the film’s three-hour and 26-minute runtime.
“People actually remember it,” Myers says of her performance as Anna Kyle Brown, sister to Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Kyle Burkhart.
A film that showcases the Reign of Terror—a period in the 1920s when Osage Nation members were killed following the discovery of oil on Osage land in Oklahoma—lively, flapper-styled Anna goes missing and is later found murdered.
But before her disappearance, Anna packs a punch as one of the four Kyle sisters. A vessel of joy, she comes to soothe her grief over the death of her family members by drinking. “My whole goal was [that] I want to make sure that Anna is a full, living person,” Myers explains. “She's extremely flawed, but deep down, it's all driven through love—her lack of love, her wanting to love, how much she loves other people. So for me, I'm glad that people saw her and saw Anna and they're like, ‘Oh, yeah, she's definitely all over the place, but you could see her humanity.’”
When Myers hops on the phone in early February, she is still finalizing her plans for the Academy Awards. Killers of the Flower Moon has taken its cast where most Scorcese films have gone before—all around award season—and this film is no different, except for its history-making tendencies.
Gladstone is the first Native American acting nominee in Oscar history. And despite her not winning Best Actress in a Leading Role (and KOTFM losing all 10 nominations), the resounding outcry over loss reflects a more important achievement: the Kyle sisters’ story had a powerful impact on audiences.
When we speak, Myers is still in the thick of it for awards season and remains charmed by both the glamor and community that comes together at each ceremony. “You work on one set with people, and it's rare that you're going to be on the set again with them,” she says. “I think it's a good time for everybody to come together and celebrate and talk about their projects, talk about new projects, talk about old projects and just be glammed up. It's exhausting, but I think honestly, once you're inside the event and you're able to just chill and chat and eat, and it's nice.”
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KOTFM hit theaters late last fall when the industry was still in the middle of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike; the Writers Guild of America strike had ended hardly a month before. Amidst this major labor movement moment, Scorcese’s film showcased the need for beautiful, intentional, laborious on-screen storytelling.
“I think the right movie can help inspire people to be better,” Myers says.
For most of her adolescence, Myers didn’t have a television. She recalls being behind on the shows of the moment. But once she finished high school, she watched whatever she could, namechecking Smallville, The CW’s take on Superman, and The Notebook as some of her favorites. She preferred anything that was different from real life. “That kind of escapism where the hero always wins, and it's always sweet and magical kind of thing because life was depressing.”
She later adds, “I just love the suspension of disbelief of all of it, the hope of it, the fact that you can see these amazing things and see people do amazing things.”
Myers, a member of the Wichita tribe, was raised in Prescott Valley, Ariz. She went to college with the intent to study Egyptology with an emphasis on astronomy, but high costs made her reconsider her path and she dropped out. She toyed with the idea of acting and with some encouragement from her husband, she signed up for an acting class. Up to four times a week for about a year, she would make an approximate four-hour round-trip commute to Phoenix. “It’s just one of those things that I fell in love with and I jumped headfirst into.”
Acting for 15 years, Myers deems KOTFM as her first big break. “With acting, they always tell you, there's no one way to get there. There's people who get off the bus and immediately get discovered and they're the next Tom Cruise.”
When you’re not instantly the next big box office star, the path involves lots of classes. There are also endless auditions, student films and no’s. It can be hard not to get “bogged down by the business.” “When you actually get to act, just purely act, it’s always awesome, and it always feels good. And I think that’s what drives me to the next part… And then after a certain point, I was like, ‘I spent too much d*** time and money on this to give up.’”
Prior to playing Anna, Myers had guest-star roles on NBC’s This Is Us and Rutherford Falls. She also writes and was in a number of labs, including the fourth annual Native American Writers Lab, A3 Artist Agency’s The Colony program and the Native American Feature Film Writer’s Lab. She was also a semi-finalist in the ABC/Disney writers’ program.
Propelled by KOTFM, Myers has dived more into spearheading her own projects. She’s in the writing stage of a feature project and getting ready to move into the editing phase of a documentary, which explores Native American representation in the entertainment industry.
“Growing up, I didn't see myself on TV. I didn't see myself in places like Cannes and the Oscars and stuff like that,” Myers says. “It's me trying to show more of the Native youth and just Natives that ‘Hey, we belong here.’ This is a space that traditionally we haven't been in, but we're, trying our hardest to open the door and keep it open and bring others with us.”
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Myers feels hopeful thanks to seeing an Afro-Indigenous lead (Kali Reis) on HBO’s True Detective: Night Country and Disney Plus’ Echo. “We have our first deaf and disabled amputee,” she says of star Alaqua Cox. “She's a badass… I love that we're not only seeing Native representation, but we're seeing it in different forms.”
She continues, “I think I'm just excited to see the opportunities for Natives coming up. Like I said, we're trying to make it not a moment, but a movement.”
See also: Wrapped Amor: How Costume Design Built Mollie Burkhart In ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon'
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