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.

2024 – The Hollywood Reporter

Seija Rankin

September 19, 2024


Article taken from The Hollywood Reporter

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.

“No one’s going to watch the scene where you weep by the fountain if you don’t, earlier in the episode, fuck somebody by that fountain,” she deadpans.

But then she filmed Three Women, and her attitude changed.

In the show, which premiered Sept. 13 on Starz, Gilpin, 38, stars as long-suffering Indiana housewife Lina, one of the three female characters of the title — the others are played by DeWanda Wise and newcomer Gabrielle Creevy. Shailene Woodley leads as a writer who extracts the women’s innermost secrets through a series of extremely in-depth interviews, and their lives unfold in a trio of separate storylines packed with gritty drama, tons of sex scenes and a bracing amount of nudity.

“I used to think that my purpose as a body in sex scenes was to trick the world into thinking I was a 12,” Gilpin says. “I show up at work three hours early, and it’s all hands on deck to morph me into the video game version of myself. Three Women felt like the opposite. My purpose wasn’t to look like somebody’s fantasy, but to show this character having a life-changing experience.”

The series is based on the 2019 best-seller by Lisa Taddeo, who spent a decade interviewing women throughout the country, excavating their most private thoughts. “The beauty of Lisa’s writing,” says Gilpin, “is that she focuses on these moments that we thought were ours alone and makes you feel like, ‘How did she know that thing I never told anyone about?’ ”

Gilpin read the book when it came out and, like many others, argued with her friends about which of the three women they most resembled. “I thought I was all Sloan,” she says of the sleek, wealthy restaurateur portrayed by Wise. “I thought I was cool and unpredictable. But my friends all said, ‘No, you’re Lina.’ ” When the adaptation was being cast in 2021, Gilpin sent an audition tape and wrote a letter to Taddeo and her co-producers. “Even though I am a more disgruntled, tired, bitchier person than Lina is, my pulsing, desperate need to play this part was very Lina-like, and that probably came across,” she says with a laugh.

The show originally was slated to premiere in 2023, but Showtime dropped the series during one of its content pivots, leaving its fate uncertain until Starz scooped it up. Gilpin has lived many lives in the time since she filmed it — she published a book, starred in a Damon Lindelof series (Mrs. Davis) and gave birth to her second daughter — all of which has her re-thinking her approach to the industry.

In the future, she says, rather than be grateful for any role that comes along, she’d like to be more deliberate about what she puts out into the world. “I’m starting to be more intentional about the kinds of things I’m in,” she notes. “I mean, I say that, but then cut to me in some superhero movie, playing the ghost of the great-aunt of Wolverine.”

What was the experience of waiting to find out the fate of Three Women like? Were you worried when Showtime dropped the show?

I’ve had experiences in the business that felt like disappointments in the moment, and then six months later the problem is solved and you feel embarrassed for having been so disappointed. The tides change so quickly. So I certainly felt sad, but you do have to shrug your shoulders and acknowledge that this is capitalism and the second you wrap the thing you made belongs to the algorithm now. You take your opus and put tap shoes on it and sell it to the highest bidder. I don’t have any illusions about that part of the business. I’m in it for my mortgage, and tapas, as well as the occasional blips of artistic catharsis. And this isn’t a merit-based system — there are brilliant actors waiting tables, and there are some talentless people living in mansions with statues on their mantles.

I know it’s been a long time, but what are your strongest memories of what the vibe was like on set?

We made this show so long ago. My little postpartum brain — I had my second baby in April — is working so hard on this press tour. I’m like, what was it like on set? You mean, back when the dinosaurs signed the declaration of independence? Filming felt like this weird rehab retreat, where the three of us were each there to do our opuses and we would pass each other in the hall and be like,hello, I know you’re having an intense experience. I am too. I love you. So watching the show and seeing their episodes and scenes was very emotional. Like okay this is how I was ripping my soul out on the other side of the wall, when you were doing it on your side. They felt like my sisters who I didn’t know at all.

Was it that different from other projects? Do you really know people with whom you work on a movie or TV show?

I can’t believe SNL hasn’t done a sketch about press tours yet. Working with people on a movie or a show is the strangest social experiment, because you are in your own separate trailers, but they probably share a wall and you can hear the toilet flush in the other person’s trailer. And it always sounds like an old cow dying. So you’re like okay this person knows I’m using the bathroom. Then you go out to set and stare deep into each other’s eyes and pretend that our children are dying in our hands. And then you’re doing the crossword next to each other. And then the press tour is like, what music is on their iPod? It’s like, I don’t know. But I know the traumatic things they think about! I’m doing a press tour for this show, so I’m sure someday soon I’ll be answer what Shai Woodley’s favorite snack is.

What stands out to you the most about working during the postpartum period?

Giving birth was like, oh God, I’ve been treating this NASA supercomputer like a Tamagotchi. That’s insane and I can never go back. And I don’t think that everyone has to become a mom — hell no. But it feels like you’re shown a room in your brain that you didn’t know existed, you have nuclear weapons and Marvel powers in there, you use it to give birth and then they’re like okay close that door. You don’t need to use that room again. Back to being young and hot for you. And it’s like no, I can never unsee what I just saw about my own capability as a person. I just went to fucking Jupiter and now you want me on set telling the male protagonist of a story he just did a great job in the field?

You thought you were a Sloan when you read the book, but once you started putting yourself in Lina’s shoes, what did you notice most about your similarities or differences?

Lina and I are different in the sense that my own cringe meter is so much higher than hers, and she is so much more unapologetic about her own desire. There were some scenes, like when she gets up and dances at the bachelorette party, that I was nervous about how I would act it out without telling everyone I would never do that in real life.

Lisa Taddeo has talked a lot about the importance of building a really female-forward set; did it feel markedly different to you?

I have to say, the men on this show were holding the book in their hands just as much as we were. We had the best men — Austin Stowell, John Patrick, Blair Underwood. That’s a tough position to be in, I’m sure it felt like coming into a room and all the women are like [makes finger gun] SAY THE RIGHT THING! But they all did.

Do you have another book in you?

I wrote that book during the point of the pandemic when we all thought the world was capital-O-Over. It was like, this is the end and also this is my book. Then the world came back and it was like wait, we’re all not going to die, and I put my inner most thoughts out? It was terrifying, and hopefully that convergence of circumstances will never fucking happen again and I’ll never write another book.

Especially after having written a memoir, are you ever worried that you’re becoming too known, or that people feel like they know you too well?

I love being an actor and I can’t believe how lucky I’ve been. At the same time, I can walk around outside and only get recognized once, maybe twice a year. Literally. You can find me on whatever streaming platform you want, and if not no worries. The people who stop me are usually people who it seems like I would be friends with in real life. And they want the interaction to be over before I want it to be over, which is wonderful. They don’t even take their headphones out. It’s usually that once a year a gay man squints at me from across the subway.


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