Welcome to Admiring Betty Gilpin, your online resource dedicated to the amazing actor and author, Betty Gilpin! You may better remember Betty for her award nominated role in GLOW. But her career also extends to other well-known projects such as Nurse Jackie, Gaslit, The Hunt, Masters of Sex, Roar, Isn't it Romantic, and Mrs. Davis. Betty will be seen next in Three Women, American Primeval, and Death by Lightning. This fan site aims to be a comprehensive and respectful place dedicated to Betty Gilpin and her career.

Usually, when Betty Gilpin gets a part, the first thing she does is start to write as if she’s that person. She imagines their greatest fears and wildest dreams. But when she landed the part of Lina in Three Women — based on Lisa Taddeo’s book by the same name — that work was already done for her. So how did she find Lina? “I remember writing Lisa and saying, ‘Over-caffeinated deer with cum in her mouth?’ And she was like, ‘Yes.’”

That’s one way to describe Lina, one of the titular women at the heart of the upcoming Starz adaptation of Taddeo’s bestseller. When Taddeo’s book was published in 2019, it presented a stunningly honest look at women’s sexuality as told through the story of Lina, a housewife in Indiana whose husband hadn’t shown her true affection in years; Sloane, a happily married woman in Rhode Island whose husband enjoyed watching her have sex with other people; and Maggie, a young woman whose world had been warped by a high school teacher who had initiated a sexual relationship with her when she was 17. And when she was strong enough to come forward, she wasn’t believed.

In Taddeo’s book, in which the author spent eight years getting to know her subjects, Maggie was the only person that didn’t use a pseudonym, which is precisely why Taddeo felt she had to have a conversation with the real Maggie before adapting the story for TV.

“One of my first feelings after we started talking about adapting it was that whole fear of: Is Maggie going to be believed by less people, more people, is this going to be good for her?” Taddeo says. After speaking with Maggie, and all the real subjects from the book, Taddeo decided that Maggie’s story needed to be heard. “Everybody was so aligned in making sure that her world was both accurate and that when she watched it she would feel compassion and love and care.”

Gabrielle Creevy inhabits Maggie on the screen, following her journey both in the past as she enters into a relationship with her teacher, and in her present as she presses charges and tells her story. “You see her grow and you see her gain her power back,” Creevy says. “I felt really powerful doing it. She knows what’s right and she didn’t stop. That’s what’s so amazing about her.”

“Her story is one really of resilience, of determination, of strength, of bravery in the face of all odds,” showrunner Laura Eason adds. “There’s a real drive and buoyancy to that kind of ability to stare down what faced her in coming forward.”

Maggie’s story runs alongside those of Lina (Betty Gilpin) and Sloane (DeWanda Wise), Lina being the aforementioned deer. “I was such a huge fan of the book, and when they first announced that they were making into a show, I felt skeptical,” Gilpin says. “Part of what’s so incredible about the book is that because there’s no imagery, because you’re not attaching a person to it, you’re seeing yourself in all three women. Lisa almost didn’t allow us to make a judgment on them because we were so transported to their psyche. But I think that weirdly, doing the show with that book as a map, it felt like she didn’t give us the option to do it incorrectly because it was like we had the answers to the test.”

Lina’s story is one of a mid-life awakening as she reconnects with an old high school flame and begins having an affair. “I didn’t want to play sad mom. She’s so much more than that,” Gilpin says. “I really wanted to lean into her hope and childlike love of romance. So much of her is frozen at 16 in a heartbreaking way, but also in a wonderful way. She’s one of those people that when they’re talking to you, you find yourself taking a deep breath in the hopes that they’ll take a deep breath, but it’s never going to happen because they’re a runaway train of want and need.”

Then there’s Sloane, the absurdly beautiful, incredibly confident, happily married bisexual woman. With her husband Richard (Blair Underwood), they’re the show’s only representation of a happy marriage. “At the end of the day, their relationship is rooted in love and respect and regard for each other, but love more than anything,” Underwood says. “He adores this woman.”

Sloane finds herself attracted to another man in a way that really tests that love, but the show isn’t just about crushes and sexual desire. It’s about the inner workings of these women — what drives them, what makes them happy, and how they experience the world. The camera doesn’t turn away from the sexy moments … or the tough ones. “So much of it is about the majestic of the mundane,” DeWanda Wise says. “You’re dropped into these women’s very real lives. Anytime you see a woman on a toilet, we’re going to be telling the truth. You know what I mean? If you were a fan of this book, and I am, could you imagine reading it and being like, ‘Oh, they did the slick Hollywood thing?’ Nobody wants that.”

Telling these women’s stories is Gia, as Shailene Woodley steps in to play the Lisa Taddeo character, someone who is very much so also struggling to figure out what she wants from life. “The minute I met Lisa, I was like, ‘Where have you been my whole life? Things would’ve been so much easier if I had met you sooner,” Woodley recalls. “Gia to me is a character that is obviously based on Lisa and a lot of the experiences she’s had in her own life and just by the nature of the world and how art tends to work sometimes. I relate a lot to the person that Gia is and the life that Gia has lived. It’s easier for us sometimes to get lost in someone else’s story and chaos and help them feel less alone than it is to do the hard work on ourselves. In a way, she’s fearless — she travels across the country and meets strangers — and yet underneath it all is this constant quaking fear of, ‘Am I going to be okay? Is life a safe place to exist in?’”

More than three years after they filmed the 10-episode series, the team behind it is now hoping that it will find a safe place to exist in. In Taddeo’s introduction to the book, she writes that she “set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn.” The show has a similar goal.

“Withholding judgment and making space for who people are is a really important thing that happens in the show,” Eason says, adding, “If you really dig down into your want and really trust your gut and really go for the thing that in your heart of hearts you know is right for you, it can yield incredible things. I think that’s true of the message of the show, the content of the show and the experience of the show.”

Three Women premieres Friday, Sept. 13, on Starz.

Source: EW.com

September 5, 2024 Comments Off on Three Women stars were hesitant to adapt Lisa Taddeo’s bestseller: ‘I felt skeptical’
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