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

Betty Gilpin was a guest on The Late Late Show with James Corden on Wednesday, April 12, 2023. Check out a clip from her interview via YouTube.

Mrs. Davis co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez joined star Betty Gilpin at Deadline’s Contenders TV event to discuss the sci-fi series which asks, “are we losing part of our humanity as we become reliant on tech?”

“Essentially, when Tara and I were talking in those early days,” said Lindelof, “Tara just said, ‘I wish there was an app that just told us what to do, and that it was something we could trust.’ And that was the beginning of this idea – we sort of looked down the barrel of the algorithmic gun and realized we’re not that far off from Siri or Alexa not telling us what the weather is or how to get from A to B, but whether or not we should get a divorce or quit our job or find purpose in our lives or be our therapist. And once those things started to happen, we’d be in a lot of trouble because we’d stop relying on one another and start relying on something that was essentially trying to sell us something.”

Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez pit faith against technology in this sci-fi drama series for Peacock. The story follows Simone (Betty Gilpin), a nun set on battling an all-powerful Artificial Intelligence known as “Mrs. Davis,” with help from a resistance group and her ex-boyfriend Wiley (Jake McDorman). The series will debut on Peacock on April 20, 2023.

“We were talking about the things that make us anxious,” said Hernandez. “Our anxiety around tech and how, especially during [the pandemic] how reliant we became on our phones, and on information or misinformation we were getting on our phones.”

“It’s the most absurd braid of a thousand genres I’ve ever read and I was in from page one for sure,” said Gilpin. “Even though the show is a hundred genres, I find that more like life than when I’m doing a script that’s just one color, one tone… I real life, your day changes genre a hundred times.”

Source: Deadline Hollywood

Welcome to Admiring Betty Gilpin! This site is still a work in progress, but I wanted to do a “soft launch” in time for Betty’s upcoming series on Peacock, Mrs. Davis!

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