Few things have so dominated the zeitgeist recently like artificial intelligence (AI) — the extremely cool but extremely concerning technology with the power to create images that supersede reality or even compose works of art without human guidance. Of course, tensions between man and machine, and fears that tech could become too dominant and replace us, go back for generations, fueling cautionary tales from John Henry to I, Robot. But in the new series Mrs. Davis, about a nun who goes to battle with an all-knowing AI algorithm, those age-old existential questions get a refreshingly modern update in what’s one of the most enjoyably strange releases of the year.

From Damon Lindelof, purveyor of odd but compelling shows like Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen, and Tara Hernandez (The Big Bang Theory, Young Sheldon), Mrs. Davis stars GLOW alum Betty Gilpin as Simone, a nun tasked with taking on Mrs. Davis, an omnipresent, omniscient algorithm Simone blames for killing her father. There’s way, way more going on in the story — a head-scratching mash-up of sci-fi, drama, comedy, action, and more — that would be impossible to synopsize and would ruin the fun if one tried.

“I had worked with Damon Lindelof on the movie The Hunt, so I knew that he majors in crazy s–t,” Gilpin tells Shondaland in a recent interview. “So, I was expecting some form of crazy s–t. I didn’t know it would be this. I was in from page one; he and Tara have created a wholly original, absolutely insane, ever-changing world.”

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The first 4 episodes of Mrs. Davis are now streaming on Peacock!

Mrs. Davis has to be seen to be believed. Peacock’s offbeat new series from Tara Hernandez (The Big Bang Theory) and Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers) is a totally singular creation: the story of a nun, Sister Simone, played by Betty Gilpin, who takes on the fight of her life against a seemingly all-powerful artificial intelligence app. It’s a funky premise brought to fantastic life by Gilpin and the rest of the cast and creative team, whose total commitment turns the series into one of this year’s best debuts yet.

The show’s unexpectedness starts with Simone herself, a woman who colors outside pop culture’s usual nun lines. “I think we’re used to seeing nuns as horror movie nuns or ‘Climb Every Mountain,'” Gilpin told TV Guide. “[They’re] either these perfect, stoic people, or [there’s] blood coming out of their eyes, and they’re transparent and, like, wheeling across the floor at you.”

In preparation for the role, Gilpin spoke with real-life nuns, who, obviously, fit neither box. “They dispelled all the clichés that I had about nuns,” she said. “These are women who, yes, have cut themselves off from certain aspects of life and society, but in order to hyper-connect and be almost living meditations. The work that the women who I spoke to are doing is far more important than memorizing and squinting in a tight dress, which is what I do. So I felt very moved by them.”

“They’re all themselves and different,” Gilpin continued. “And I think that [initially] I was like, ‘Well, I’m playing a nun. She has to be a certain way.’ But actually, she is herself. She just happens to have had this experience that also makes her a person of faith.”

That gives Simone and the show something in common: Neither one is solely defined by any one thing. Mrs. Davis juggles, as Gilpin put it, “11 different genres on every page.”

“I remember filming, sometimes we’d be like, ‘Is this all going to come together as one show?'” she recalled. “To me, it completely does, and is more like life than when a show just sticks to one color or one tone. Life changes genre every five seconds.”

Gilpin isn’t losing sight of how rare a role — and a show — like this one is. “It’s my favorite part I’ve ever played,” she said.

“And it is never, ever, ever boring.”

Source: TV Guide

In the upcoming Peacock original series Mrs. Davis, Betty Gilpin marshals her talents to play Simone, a nun on a mission to stop the world’s most powerful and beloved artificial intelligence, with only her faith and determination to guide her. It’s a potent central role in a wild and ambitious new series from creators Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez, and for Gilpin, it feels like one she was born to play.

“This job asks 100% of me and I immediately was like, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life for this,’” Gilpin told The Hollywood Reporter at the show’s Los Angeles premiere last week. “It feels like a thousand genres in one and so it was like a cat toy for my brain, really.”

Anyone who’s seen trailers teasing the new show understands what Gilpin’s talking about. Mrs. Davis looks like a wild combination of sci-fi, comedy, drama, and a few other things that might be unclassifiable, and it all centers on Simone. According to Lindelof, who worked with Gilpin on The Hunt, the actress was their first choice for the role, even when they weren’t sure they’d be able to land her.

“When we first started talking about Simone, Betty was on the very early list but she was unavailable, I think, because she’d just had her daughter,” Lindelof said. “That was a bummer but we moved on, and then when we wrote the pilot and set it up at Peacock, everyone started asking, ‘Who is Simone going to be?’ We kept saying that it was a Betty Gilpin-type if we could get her. The question became, ‘Well, has anyone asked her?’ So I emailed her and said, ‘Look, we won’t get our feelings hurt but this thing is perfect for you. Would you be willing to read the script?’”

Gilpin was willing, and by the end of the first meeting with Lindelof and Hernandez, the two creators were thinking of how they could script the show in a way that was even more tailored to their chosen star. For Gilpin herself, whose past work includes everything from Nurse Jackie to GLOW to The Tomorrow War, it always felt like a chance to embody more depth than any other character she’d taken on before.

“I feel like I either play these hardened, sarcastic, sardonic or wry characters or characters who have their arms wide open and are vulnerable and hopeful. This character really is both,” Gilpin said. “She may have started as the first kind but her faith really changed her as a person. We see a lot of flashbacks to what she was like before she was a person of faith. For myself, not being a person of faith, it was an experiment to figure out what it would be like if I really believe in something this deeply and I found that really joyful.”

Source: Syfy

Betty Gilpin was a guest on The Daily Show on Monday, April 17th. Check out her interview via YouTube.

In dark comedy Mrs. Davis, from creators Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof, Betty Gilpin plays Sister Simone, a motorcycle-riding, take-no-prisoners nun on a quest: to find the holy grail.

Her reasoning has nothing to do with a religious pilgrimage. It’s about something decidedly more modern, in fact: She just wants the show’s titular, ubiquitous artificial intelligence — something seemingly everyone else in the world adores — to leave her alone.

Sister Simone gets some unlikely allies in her ex-boyfriend, the destructive cowboy Wiley (Jake McDorman), and his merry band of meatheads that come with obscure (probably code) names like “JQ” (that one’s played by Chris Diamantopoulos).

What results is a story of a fight among religion, information, and love — three things that have historically had great pull over humanity (sometimes overlapping like a Venn diagram to do so) — for the attention of one woman who really just wants to make jam, ride her horse, and maybe eat her fill of Swedish meatballs from a buffet restaurant.

“When I think about religion, or the church, and the internet, it’s almost like these two institutions were created for the same initial why of people wanting to ask big questions and connect to each other,” Gilpin told Rotten Tomatoes. “And then, we make these institutions that are just answers and ended up disconnecting people. It sort of does the opposite of the why.”

While she has “had an aversion to the church and aversion to the internet because of the negative repercussions that both have had,” Gilpin said, her show is meant to suggest that religious faith “can be very pure and beautiful and inexplicable” versus something like an AI that “is giving you all the answers and everything you want to hear — you’re in a feedback loop of validation.”

“I think that cuts you off from your ability to access the former, which is maybe the reason for being alive,” she says of technology. “So we’re playing with fire.”

That the word “love” has also been used in conjunction with these terms, be it a reference to a messiah or a smartphone, is significant to the story. Technology, especially, feeds on nostalgia and longing. Its very existence means you can keep tabs on former paramours or others who once meant a great deal to you. Co-creator Hernandez even named the AI-in-question after an actual Mrs. Davis, her first- and second-grade teacher, because she said the writers wanted a female-identifying presence who was “benevolent and gave us a structure and care but also was there to drop the hammer if we were stepping out of line.”

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Betty Gilpin was a guest on TODAY this morning! Check out her interview via YouTube.

Betty Gilpin attended the Deadline Contenders event for Mrs. Davis earlier today! Check out 18 images from the red carpet and panel that were added to the photo gallery!

Betty Gilpin turned to her actor dad, Jack Gilpin, for help when she was preparing for her new Peacock series “Mrs. Davis.”

“He introduced me to three nuns,” Betty told me at the show’s premiere Thursday night in Los Angeles.

Papa Gilpin is not only a veteran actor (he currently plays Church the Butler on HBO’s “The Gilded Age“), but he’s also an Episcopalian priest. “He did connect me with nuns to talk to,” Betty said. “They are these incredible feminist warriors in their own right.”

Have the sisters seen the show? “I’d be interested to know what they think about it, but I don’t think they have Peacock,” Betty said, laughing.

In the series, created by Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof, Gilpin plays a nun in search of the Holy Grail in her quest to defeat a mysterious AI power. The show is more than just genre-bending – it’s a totally bonkers action dramedy that addresses both religion and AI.

“It’s crazy!” Gilpin said of the show. “I feel like, oftentimes, TV is either divided into joyful but mindless junk food or topical but depressing. This is topical and joyful and inventive. Just when you think it’s a cartoon, it breaks your heart and gets really serious but then it turns back into something you’ve never seen before. It’s Coen Brothers, it’s Looney tunes, it’s madness.”

It’s also going to be submitted in the drama category for Emmys consideration. “It’s hard to categorize this as drama or comedy,” Gilpin said. “It’s like, I literally just slipped on a banana peel, but then in the next scene it’s crazy intense drama.”

Gilpin first teased her character’s wardrobe during an episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast in September.

“The costume designer is very much British and put me in a wool habit, and we are shooting in the absolute desert, and it’s so hot,” she said at the time. “I don’t know how these nuns do it. I hope that when they’re at the convent and they have no visitors, they’re like, ‘Should we just wear boxers today?’ Because this is insane.”

Hernandez told me at the premiere, “It was wool in the middle of the desert. We shot for 100 days in 100-degree weather and then we went to Spain and it was cold and rainy weather. Hopefully, it’s iconic enough that we all forgot about how uncomfortable it was.”

“Mrs. Davis” premieres on Peacock April 20.

Source: Variety

As an actor, Betty Gilpin says the gigs that “are painful to do are the ones where you feel like you’re only being asked to do five percent of what you can do” as a performer. Enter Mrs. Davis.

Peacock’s new series casts the GLOW alum as a nun named Simone who is intent on destroying the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence, aka Mrs. Davis. It’s not a spoiler to say that the series — created by Lost guru Damon Lindelof with The Big Bang Theory vet Tara Hernandez — was the opposite of painful because it activates all of Gilpin’s talents. It’s a genre-blending mashup (think drama and wacky comedy mixed with sci-fi and action) with a host of themes (best explained here) and Gilpin says she was more than ready.

“This job asks 100 percent of me and I immediately was like, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life for this,’” she told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday night while standing on the blue carpet inside L.A.’s DGA Theatre for the premiere. “It feels like a thousand genres in one and so it was like a cat toy for my brain, really.”

A big reason for that is while Simone may be a nun on a mission, she has a layered backstory that unfolds as the season goes to reveal a depth that Gilpin found thrilling. It would be spoiling the plot to go into detail, so best leave it to Gilpin to explain it in broad strokes. “I feel like I either play these hardened, sarcastic, sardonic or wry characters or characters who have their arms wide open and are vulnerable and hopeful. This character really is both,” Gilpin said. “She may have started as the first kind but her faith really changed her as a person. We see a lot of flashbacks to what she was like before she was a person of faith. For myself, not being a person of faith, it was an experiment to figure out what it would be like if I really believe in something this deeply and I found that really joyful.”

Speaking of deep beliefs, Lindelof told THR that the series “doesn’t work without Betty.” He had a relationship with the actress after she starred in The Hunt, the 2020 feature film that was written by Lindelof with Nick Cuse.

“When we first started talking about Simone, Betty was on the very early list but she was unavailable, I think, because she’d just had her daughter,” he recalled while standing next to Hernandez, whose initial script inspired the series. “That was a bummer but we moved on, and then when we wrote the pilot and set it up at Peacock, everyone started asking, ‘Who is Simone going to be?’ We kept saying that it was a Betty Gilpin-type if we could get her. The question became, ‘Well, has anyone asked her?’ So I emailed her and said, ‘Look, we won’t get our feelings hurt but this thing is perfect for you. Would you be willing to read the script?’”

Lindelof said Gilpin responded a day or two later and they set up a Zoom meeting: “The three of us ended up talking for like two hours and we started writing the show for her. We had a habit that needed to be altered quite intensely in order to accommodate Betty’s tremendous talent.”

Mrs. Davis premieres on April 20.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter