Margie Burkhart, granddaughter of the main characters in "Killers of the Flower Moon," tells PEOPLE about meeting her grandfather.
people.com
Margie Burkhart still remembers seeing her grandfather for the first time, when she was a child. With fluffy white hair and beautiful blue eyes, you wouldn’t know from looking at an elderly Ernest Burkhart that he was one of the men responsible for murdering a number of his Native American wife’s relatives as part of a plot to inherit their lucrative oil rights — a plot that is at the center of the new movie
Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by
Martin Scorsese, which premieres in theaters on Oct. 20.
“He just looked like a sweet little man, and if you saw him on the street, you would never know what he was capable of doing or what he did,” says Margie of her first encounter with her grandfather, Ernest. “It was wild to me how he just looked normal.”
In
Killers of the Flower Moon, Ernest is played by
Leonardo DiCaprio, who stars alongside Lily Gladstone, who portrays Margie’s grandmother Mollie, and Robert De Niro as William Hale, the ringleader of the plot to murder Mollie’s family, who were members of the oil-rich Osage Nation in northern Oklahoma in the 1920s.