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On the heels of Lily Gladstone’s historic Oscar nomination for Killers Of The Flower Moon, the actor is keeping busy in between their recent critically acclaimed series Under The Bridge and one of the latest projects on the 2024 movie schedule, Fancy Dance. Written and directed by Erica Tremblay, Fancy Dance centers on Gladstone’s Jax as she looks for her missing sister and takes close care of her niece Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson). Along with the movie shedding light on an unfortunately common occurrence in the Native community, it follows the Oscar nominee as a queer woman as well.
When CinemaBlend chatted with Erica Tremblay about working alongside Lily Gladstone, who has previously talked openly about going by they/she pronouns herself, the filmmaker spoke about crafting the queer indigenous role of Jax. In Tremblay’s words:
I know Lily based a lot of Jax off of two of her male cousins. And as a person who used to work in sex work and as a person who used to strip at strip clubs, I had always imagined like the scene between Jackson and Sapphire and I wanted a moment of like consensual sex work. And so, I found a way to like work into the film as Jax is like trying to find clues for where her sister is. I think that’s kind of like the beauty that I love about watching certain films. Like Jax just is, right? Like it’s not a part of Jax’s storyline necessarily. And I love when you watch a film and something is just like a thing about a person not like what the film is about. And I think that’s kind of how we approach Jax’s queerness in this film. Like Jax just is, that’s a part of who she is and, it just exists in the film in that way as well.
Tremblay is a Native American woman who identifies as queer and worked closely with Fancy Dance’s lead to authentically portray the indigenous LGBTQ+ community through the role of Jax. As the writer/director shared, she wanted the character to not be purely defined by their sexuality, but very much represent it.
Tremblay decided to do so by including a brief scene that implies Jax and a sex worker being consensually intimate. The filmmaker also said this:
We talked a lot about the wardrobe. We worked very closely with Amy Higdon, our amazing costume designer, and we wanted Jax to feel very lived in and to feel to come to life in that way. And I remember there were several different kinds of clothes that we put Lily in. And then as soon as it was like the maroon cut off and the, and the braid, it was like, ‘Oh, that’s a person I recognized from my community.’ And Lily’s like, ‘Oh, I recognize this person from my community as well’. And so I think a lot of it came to life with the costuming. And yeah, I think it was just a sensibility as a woman writing a woman, and then Lily bringing their lived experience to the role as well.
Prior to their collaboration on Fancy Dance, Tremblay told us that the pair worked together on a short film called Little Chief, and they were excited to make a full-length feature film together. Since the two of them are indigenous women, they were excited to tell a story about their community – specifically by speaking about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women epidemic. As Tremblay also shared:
While Jax is in no way autobiographical, Jax is really an amalgamation of my mom and my sister and the folks that I grew up with. And you know, my co-writer, Michiana and I worked to bring as much authenticity to this character and all of the indigenous characters in this film as we could.
Fancy Dance’s road to release has not been a straightforward one. The movie originally premiered at Sundance over a year ago, and it did not receive distribution rights for over a year after its debut, leading Tremblay and her co-writer Miciana Alise to write a THR guest column on the subject. Then, Apple landed the global rights earlier this year.
Fancy Dance is now playing in select theaters and can be streamed for those with an AppleTV+ subscription this Friday, June 28.