Actress Betty Gilpin, 31, was born in New York and raised in Roxbury, Connecticut. She graduated from Fordham College and has appeared extensively in theater and on television, notably as Carrie Roman on Nurse Jackie, Audrey on the Starz series American Gods and Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan on the Netflix series GLOW. She divides her […]

A sitcom about the 1980s-era Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling is so logical as to be a foregone conclusion. The only question: How big is the hair? “Huge,” says GLOW star Betty Gilpin, whose mane in the show is actually on the more demure side. “Think ‘Teri Garr in Tootsie’ puffy. I avoided the full perm.” […]

The daughter of actor parents, Betty Gilpin has wound up channeling the medical profession — in recurring roles as Dr. Carrie Roman in Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” and as researcher Nancy Leveau on “Masters of Sex.” But she trades in her lab coat for wrestling tights in Netflix’s “GLOW,” which revolves around a troupe of women […]

“Working on GLOW is incredible—it’s really fun playing a character who is so different from myself. Debbie wakes up in the morning and does full hair and makeup to go to the grocery store. I think she always has a montage going in her mind… Even the walk to the pharmacy can happen in slow […]

The wild world of female wrestling isn’t always thought of as a feminist frontier, but the Netflix series GLOW (returning June 29) has been as much a source of empowerment for its stars as it has for fans. This is especially true for 31-year-old New York native Betty Gilpin, who plays soap-opera-actress-turned-wrestler Debbie Eagan on […]

Betty Gilpin is relieved to be chatting on the phone instead of over Zoom. Just a few minutes prior, she was panicking about her angles and the lighting inside her Brooklyn apartment—which side of the room made her laugh lines look deeper? “I feel liberated,” she says with a laugh. And she means it in […]

Betty Gilpin is doing something right. After a number of appearances on Dick Wolf vehicles like Law & Order and SVU and Criminal Intent—the apparent ritual hazing of every young actor coming out of New York—Gilpin has found herself firmly in the upper echelon of prestige television. That was her at the tail-end of Nurse […]

Growing up, I was a self-loathing Igor who carried the queen’s books. My job was to be the sarcastic sherpa, quietly providing the farce and adoration then becoming part of the wall when cued. I don’t know when it was, but at some point I realized the obvious truth that I was a hideous goblin […]

Hi. My name is Betty Gilpin, and I’m that one blonde, self-deprecating tit platter who cries sometimes in things your niece half-watches while also scrolling Instagram. Last year, I did a movie that got canceled. I wrote the following addled thesis-wedding toast to Uncle Sam the day after it was canceled, in an Uber on […]

Debbie Eagan’s got nothing on Betty Gilpin. Debbie, Gilpin’s character on the Netflix female-wrestling comedy “GLOW,” has only one alter ego: Liberty Belle, an All-American blonde bombshell. But over the course of a recent hour-plus conversation at a boutique cafe near her home in Brooklyn, Gilpin revealed that multiple personae are packed inside her shiny […]

Betty Gilpin has a succinct way of describing what she sees as an “overcorrection” to female characters on screen. “I used to be a bimbo with tits. Suddenly I’m a Magic 8 ball with tits,” she says, referring to the child’s toy that tells fortunes. She clarifies: “I’m 35. The roles that I played 10 […]

It’s “The Bad News Bears” with synced periods. On “GLOW,” the Netflix series that presents a fictionalized account of the 1980s show “The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling,” a ragtag band of 15 women and a couple of men try their best to make it in the world by faking it in the ring. Alison Brie […]

Betty Gilpin and Halley Feiffer suspect they must have crossed paths as infants, lolling in some green room or other. The actor Reed Birney has told them he remembers them as little girls. Ms. Gilpin, 28, and Ms. Feiffer, 30, grew up belonging to the same hothouse subculture: the children of theater people. “Halley and […]

In Glow, the new 1980s-set Netflix series produced by Liz Flahive, Carly Mensch, and Jenji Kohan, Betty Gilpin plays Debbie, a soap actor who has relinquished her career to start a family. “We meet Debbie when she thinks that the movie of her life is coming to a close and the credits are rolling,” Gilpin […]

Even the tiniest snippet of Betty Gilpin’s acting process sounds like a wild trip: “OK, now, in this line, a witch is reaching up through my throat and grabbing behind my eyeballs. And now it’s a kitten on helium.” Gilpin is one of those actors whose looks suggest one type of person until she pulls […]

Before audiences got a chance to see it, “The Hunt” entered theaters on Friday as one of the most polarizing and notorious films of the year. The movie is a dark satire in which a group of conservatives are kidnapped and hunted for sport by sadistic liberals, and it was originally scheduled to be released […]

She became known in the film and TV industry a few years ago, garnering two back-to-back Emmy nominations as a Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. She came a long way from living the life of a starving NYC actor, appearing Off-Broadway and doing small parts on shows like Law & Order. She contended […]

“I always find this to be a really weird place,” Betty Gilpin notes of Los Angeles, where she’s been busy promoting Netflix’s hit Emmy-nominated series GLOW, a raucous behind-the-scenes look at an Eighties female professional wrestling show, alongside co-star Alison Brie, who plays her best friend-turned-rival. “Ali and I are going to the MTV Movie […]

It was 2020, and like pretty much everyone else on planet Earth, the actress Betty Gilpin was having a strange year: Her first leading role in a movie, Craig Zobel’s “The Hunt,” had already stirred a manic level of controversy and drawn the ire of President Trump, before it came out on March 13. Shortly […]

After the reality set in that only Versailles mafia oligarchs could afford Brooklyn real estate, my husband and I began to browse north for our dream weekend escape cabin. For the first few years after college, my acting career had been mostly Off Broadway theater, so my bank account consisted of four hugs and a […]

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, Emmy-nominated actress Betty Gilpin returned to her childhood home in Connecticut, opting to ride out uncertain times with her parents and two younger brothers. She even slept in a bedroom that she said was “frozen in time,” complete with Destiny’s Child posters on the walls. It’s an […]

THE CHARACTER: DEBBIE EAGAN, GLOW When we meet Debbie (Betty Gilpin) in the first episode of GLOW, she is the devoted and funny friend of our ostensible heroine, Ruth (Alison Brie)—willing to pick Ruth up after an embarrassing mugging and let her swear in front of her infant. (“Of course, you can curse in front […]

Almost a decade ago Betty Gilpin and Natasha Lyonne were both performing in plays in the same theater in New York. To hear Lyonne tell it, she was in the black box, indie project that only had 20 seats to fill per show, while Gilpin was on the main stage. The East Coast performers were […]

(Warning: This post contains spoilers for the first four episodes of Mrs. Davis.) It was an inevitable question, and I did ask it: What did Betty Gilpin really think when she found out what Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez’s new sci-fi drama, Mrs. Davis, is actually about? In the Peacock series, which debuted Friday, Gilpin […]

From co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez (who’s also the showrunner), the Peacock original series Mrs. Davis follows Sister Simone (Betty Gilpin), a nun on a mission to destroy a powerful artificial intelligence that is determined to have her complete an epic quest. Begrudgingly participating with the goal of ending the AI in return, Simone […]

Betty Gilpin is way too familiar with the acting jobs that are actually hard— the ones where, as she puts it, “you feel like you’re getting to do 10% of what you actually can and want to do.” So while her new series Mrs. Davis was undeniably a challenge, it was also the “Everest of […]

ChatGPT might very well take my job one day. Which is why it was probably a bad idea to give it a job interviewing the creators and star of Peacock’s offbeat limited series “Mrs. Davis.” But the gimmick was too good to pass up: “Mrs. Davis,” created by Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof, stars Betty […]

Leading an unhinged sci-fi/spiritual/philosophical action-comedy-drama-mystery as a nun named Simone? Betty Gilpin was all in. “My agents were like, ‘You have to pretend to be cool and aloof, like you have other things going on,’ ” in approaching her pursuit of the role. I was like, ‘Guys, I will do whatever it takes. I wanna […]

After 15 years in the business, Betty Gilpin thought she knew the deal with sex scenes. To her, they weren’t so much a necessary evil as they were a necessary neutral — part of the job that she shrugged off as a prerequisite for films and television to make their way into the prestige mainstream. […]

It wasn’t the sex scenes Emmy-nominated actress Betty Gilpin was most nervous about shooting in the book-to-screen adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women. Instead, Gilpin had to embrace another form of inhibition shedding: dancing like nobody’s watching. “To think about being in a group of friends of friends and standing up, being like, ‘I’m going […]