Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough DM’d About Indigenous Issues for Years Before ‘Under the Bridge’

The star-studded casting of Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough in Hulu‘s Under the Bridge, as it turns out, all started in the DMs.

The series, which counts Keough as an executive producer, is based on the true story of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl who was beaten and murdered by a group of teenagers in Canada in 1997. Keough stars as Rebecca Godfrey, who investigated and wrote a book on the tragedy, with Gladstone as a local police officer trying to solve the case.

At the show’s Los Angeles premiere on Monday, Gladstone recalled forming a bond with Keough in 2017 as they ran in the same Hollywood circles, when she was promoting Certain Women and the Daisy Jones & The Six star was releasing American Honey.

“I was aware of her work, anyway, but I feel like being in each other’s orbit then, I became very curious about who this talent was. I also was just very taken aback when she started following me on social media — and not just following,” Gladstone told The Hollywood Reporter of Keough. “When I would post about Savanna’s Act, about MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) issues, about an action in Mount Rushmore by Lakota, the ones who have the ancestral rights to the Black Hills — she just started sharing a lot of these social posts that I was making.”

Gladstone continued, “She reached out and asked if I had any recommendations for Indigenous crew she could work with on War Pony [which Keough co-directed in 2022]. We just had a professional knowledge and respect of each other. We were struggling earlier today to remember the moment that we met in person because neither of us remember it, we just kind of feel like we’ve always known each other.”

For her part, Keough said she and Gladstone “just DM’d about random things or responded to each other’s stories, we didn’t say, like, ‘Let’s work together.’ I was such a fan of hers and when you’re a fan of other actors you’re kind of always thinking of them when you’re doing jobs. She was the first person who came to mind for this.”

#RileyKeough and #LilyGladstone pose together for the Hulu premiere of #UndertheBridge pic.twitter.com/M3anajTDBe

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) April 16, 2024

Showrunner Samir Mehta has his own unique story for how he stumbled upon his two leads, noting that right after he got the job, he moved into a new house and met a neighbor while taking out the trash. They started talking about work and Mehta mentioned the project; the neighbor told him Keough would be great for it, and that he was friends with her and would give her a call.

“And then it turned out that Lily and Riley had been communicating on Instagram and they were looking for something to do together and it was just this beautiful falling of dominoes,” Mehta recalled, joking that in booking them before their respective star turns in Killers of the Flower Moon and Daisy Jones & The Six, “we saw something in those two, they’re going places.”

Talking about why she was drawn to the show, Keough said, “Reena’s story is incredibly important in wanting to honor her and her life. Secondly, there were just themes in this series that I haven’t really seen explored in this genre, like empathy, sort of radical forgiveness, and that was interesting to me.”

The real-life Godfrey — the acclaimed author Keough portrays in the show — died of cancer just weeks before filming began, and the cast pointed to her book as their guiding light throughout the series.

Creator Quinn Shephard, who adapted the story for TV alongside Godfrey, said in beginning production so soon after Godfrey’s death, “I was grieving but in a lot of ways I think getting to go to set like the day after and getting to see the sets being built and bringing her vision to life, it was like getting to spend time with my friend.”

Under the Bridge premieres Wednesday on Hulu.