Betty Gilpin Is Having a Moment
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Last month, Betty Gilpin won an Emmy in memorable fashion: by accepting the award and reciting a zingy, rhyming poem. “To be cringe and élitist, which you’re free to find fault in / Let’s all lean toward Sam Shepard and less toward Sam Altman,” she said. The win—her first, for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series—was for her part in a backstory episode of “Widow’s Bay” set in 1702. She plays Sarah Westcott Warren, a newcomer to the doomed island, who marries its founder and creepiest resident. Gilpin’s arrival in the series feels like that of a friend; she’s funny and sympathetic from the moment she disembarks and has to repeat a little joke that doesn’t land. (“Controls the weather, does he?”) Her intelligence and wit serve her well as the horrors unfold.
Gilpin, forty, the daughter of the actors Jack Gilpin and Ann McDonough, grew up in and around New York City. She’s been a professional actor since 2008, the year she graduated from Fordham. Her breakthrough came in 2017, for her role in the excellent Netflix dramedy “GLOW,” in which she played a wrestler in nineteen-eighties Las Vegas. She’s been having a moment, it seems, ever since. Recently, in the series “Death by Lightning,” she played First Lady Lucretia Garfield, opposite Michael Shannon; she’s in two projects, Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” and Season 2 of the crime comedy “The Lowdown,” with Ethan Hawke. (“I’ve entered the part of my career where I’m either sobbing in a kitchen or mean in a boardroom, and in this one I’m mean in a boardroom,” she said of “The Social Reckoning.”) Offstage, she tends to lead with a riotous, self-effacing boldness, as evidenced in her 2022 book of essays, “All the Women in My Brain,” and in her Playbill bio for her Broadway début, last year, when she was the first actor to replace Cole Escola in “Oh, Mary!”: “Betty’s father made his Broadway debut in THIS very theatre in 1978 as an understudy—he went on one time. Betty is currently in the wings dry-heaving as her father hath done before her.” Gilpin lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their young daughters. We met for lunch in Manhattan the week she won the Emmy. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Congratulations on the Emmy! How was that experience?
It was great. I’d never been to the Creative Arts Emmys. It’s a lot of genius indoor kids having an extrovert gown moment. And that part felt very moving, less superficial. I went with one of my best friends, Alison Brie, and we just had a grand old time.
You two are so great together in “GLOW.” Like everybody else, I really wish that show had had one more season.
Well, there are two episodes that will never see the light of day. As we got shut down, it was March, 2020, so we were filming Season 4. We were all told, “We’ll be back in two weeks.” And then [as the COVID lockdown began] they just said, “Too expensive to keep these sets.” It was so sad.
No! I wish they’d let us see those. You wouldn’t think that its conceit could sustain a really meaty and fun drama, but it got better and better as it went along.
Agree. The staff writers were mostly playwrights, so they really knew how to prioritize story and connection.
By the way, just to get this out of the way, I recently learned that not only did we go to the same high school, years apart, but we had the same English teacher, Mrs. Archibald.
No way! Oh, my God, I could cry right now. That’s amazing. She was an incredible teacher. Did you go when Katherine Waterston was there?
No, but maybe you overlapped with my friend Aubrey?
Yes! We were in “West Side Story” together!
Who were you in “West Side Story”?
O.K., we’re going to start with trauma, I guess. I was Anybodys, who’s, like, you know, “Tony! The Sharks are coming!”
And the Jets are, like, “Scram, get outta here!”
I was dressed like a three-year-old boy at the beach in 1920. My costume made no sense. It was, like, a pinafore. And I just couldn’t have been a worse dancer. It was bad. And then, in “Romeo and Juliet,” Aubrey was Friar Lawrence, and, very regrettably, the love of my fifteen-year-old life played Romeo, and I played Paris, and this boy had just broken my heart, and my costume was a purple turban and a purple cape, and I begged our director, “Please let me die offstage when Romeo kills me, please don’t have my dead body be onstage for the love scene. Please!” And he got the blood of the Devil in his eyes and he was, like, “You must die onstage and crumple right next to him.” So I’m in a pile, like, weeping into my purple turban, so heartbroken in love with Romeo. I mean, the Parises of the world should unite in this indignity.
What an experience. Just all the fodder for . . . emotions.
Yeah. And now my job is to trauma-farm to pay my mortgage.
Do you actually do the Method? Calling up old emotional experiences to use in your roles?
No. I try to do a lot of creative writing way before we start. I try to joke right up until action. I used to put so much pressure on myself—I’d go, Today’s the backflip scene, emotionally, and if I don’t nail it then production’s going to shut down. And then, watching so many things I’ve been in, it’s just sort of this heartbreaking realization that there’s not a lot of correlation between how good you felt on the day versus how comfortable you were in your body and mind, you know? I used to try and white-knuckle my ability and try to conjure some external thing. Now, it’s like you just have to sort of trust in your brain and let go, more than clamp down. There are a lot of similarities with writing. It’s like a combination of ability and throwing ability out the window and just doing.
Getting really into it, with a spirit of freedom, is a big part of what makes the work good.
I think particularly for women in my industry, in order to get the job where you get to be an unleashed id, you have to look like you are id-less in a photograph. And it’s a very confusing binary sometimes. I am hoping that, as I move into the second half of my career, and wrinkles start to deepen and nipples go toward my shoes, I hope that I’ve slid under the garage door of being allowed to have those things not be a dark secret, and instead be a part of whatever character I’m playing.
Let’s talk about your childhood. I love that you grew up around South Street Seaport.
My dad and his college buddy bought this four-story eighteen-hundreds ice factory in the seventies for thirty-five thousand dollars. And I was born in 1986. We were the only occupied building on the block. His buddy had my best friend a month after I was born. And in their apartment was the old ice elevator, this huge wooden wheel surrounded by her dad’s paintings, and it was just such a cool way to grow up. And it was when it was the Fulton Fish Market still, so our little school uniforms smelled like fish all the time. As a result, I didn’t eat seafood until I was, like, twenty-eight years old. And South Street Seaport now feels so shiny and corporate, but it still has the cobblestone character. When my second brother was born, when there were five of us living in my dad’s one-floor bachelor pad, my parents thought, O.K., it’s time to go to the dirt roads of Connecticut. And I was so livid. I was, like, “How am I supposed to become a star here?” Shattering plastic goblets at nine years old.
Was it near New York? Your parents were still doing theatre, right?
Yes, Litchfield County. My dad recently left an excited voice mail saying, “Fantastic news. I’ve reserved our gravestones next to Arthur Miller. Call me back.” My husband was, like, “It’s going to be the iced-coffee grave”—tourists will be, like, “Oh, my God, Arthur Miller!” and just put their trash down on ours.
In your book, you wrote about your mom being in a play as Lincoln’s sister-in-law and wearing a big hoop skirt.
That was “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” with Sam Waterston, at Lincoln Center. I was probably eight years old. I was backstage for many plays of my parents, but there are a few that really are cemented in my brain. In my memory I saw it three hundred times. I was as off book as I could be. I have so many memories of my mom in a wig cap with other women in wig caps and her saying things like, “Well, this stays between the four of us, but”—searing gossip, in their little caps. And then, between shows, going to Ollie’s with them in that mezzanine-ready makeup and wig caps and getting sesame noodles with just the funniest, funnest people.
That must have made putting on the hoop skirt in “Oh, Mary!” even more resonant.
Yes! I mean, “Oh, Mary!” felt like a crazy culmination of everything that I never thought was possible. It’s also so much plagiarism of my mom. I describe my parents as Atticus Finch and Lucille Ball. I have a memory of my dad reading some biography the size of eight bricks taped together, quietly, in his office, and then, out the window, my mom being propelled around by a leaf blower, out of control. Doing unintentional incredible physical comedy.
How did the “Oh, Mary!” experience come about, and what did it feel like?
Amazing. I had never done Broadway because I just straight up was-slash-am not famous enough. It’s really, like, a game for movie stars to lead a Broadway show. Understandably—they have to support a commercial run and get butts in seats. And while I have done my time as, say, “wife in a miniseries about the invention of the windshield wiper” on a streaming network no one has heard of, my star meter does not always support, like, doing “Hamlet” at the Lunt-Fontanne. So I was shocked when that call came in. But it was this amazing fluke. I have a private Instagram for mostly friends. It’s me sitting in various trailers throughout my career, waiting to be called to set in costume, making videos as a regional-theatre actress losing her mind at half-hour—a character who’s sort of half Valerie Cherish, half Blanche DuBois. Cole saw those, I guess, and was, like, this person might be just demented enough to attempt to replace me as Mary Todd. I got the call when I was being a wife in a miniseries in Budapest. I was playing Lucretia Garfield, and I was in a bustle and a corset on an Oval Office eighteen-hundreds set, and my agent said, “They want you in for ‘Oh, Mary!,’ would you be interested?” You’re already cut off from your lung power when you’re in a corset, and so to start to hyperventilate was almost a medical emergency. It was a wild eight weeks. We rehearsed for, like, four days, in a room—it felt like rehearsing “Gladiator” in a Starbucks. Going out onstage that first time was the most afraid I’ve ever been.
You started your career with theatre, and then you focussed on film and TV for a few years. And then you’re suddenly on Broadway.
It was insane. It felt crazy. I just saw [fellow “Oh, Mary!” replacement] Jane Krakowski this morning—I’ve never met her before—we sort of fell into each other’s arms. I was, like, oh, I’m shaking. Like, a person who shares that, it’s the best kind of P.T.S.D. possible. I can’t wait to see it on HBO.
I first saw Cole in “Jeffery & Cole Casserole.” Did you ever watch that?
Oh, yeah. Cole has a billion characters within them, and it feels like they’re letting a bunch of those characters take the wheel for a second. So many ideas happening all at once. It’s my favorite kind of art—it’s so smart, and it uses the smart to make fun of itself, but also it’s a sincere love letter to what we were all doing as seven-year-olds, dancing and singing show tunes into our hairbrush.
Had you been in anything before that touched on camp to that extent?
I mean, maybe “GLOW.” I think back to being in an American-flag glitter diaper, with hair a foot off my head. That was a lot of contour and butt cheek for it to not be camp. A lot of people feel that way about “Oh, Mary!” and Cole’s humor in general, that it feels like a secret between you and Cole, like you have all these inside jokes together. How can something so niche be so inclusive also?
That’s a thrilling feeling. The artist needs to have the audacity to trust that the audience will get the joke. It’s much better than having things be bland.
And being condescended to. In rehearsing it, I talked about this with other people who have gone into the show—the modern temptation to mutter a joke, or throw it away, or make it sarcastic. That would always fail. You had to send it out with your heart, to the fucking mezzanine, swing for the fences every single time—and the audience would explode. You have to be unafraid to be so profoundly, loudly stupid, so that everyone was invited, instead of, like, arms-crossed, too cool. There’s such an arms-crossed, cool epidemic happening. Sleepy-status acting, I call it. Like, I need a nap, and I’m better than you.
There’s a stage actor I’ve seen in a bunch of different roles who’s incredibly talented, but his vibe is always very above it all, too cool. You’re supposed to do more than that.
Some people are multi-multi-multimillionaires from just that.
I watched some of “The Lowdown,” which was great. Ethan Hawke seems to be having the time of his life, really feeling his oats.
Yeah! As an actor, he is the opposite of arms-folded, sleepy status, too-cool-to-care. He, and Tommy Lee Jones in that season—it’s very profound to me that they are using their lifetime in this business, as men, to ask questions about the things inside them that they don’t understand and that scare them, instead of performing calm masculinity. It’s so much harder to do. And it’s the purpose of creativity to swim in questions instead of answers. Working with Ethan felt like going back to school. The way he uses his age and comfort in himself to kind of be . . . more youthful in thought and sexier in body than ever.
You had a great dynamic. I haven’t seen the first season yet, but I could feel that it’s so good for his character to have your character challenging him a bit.
Yeah. He’s like “Fear and Loathing” Charlie Brown, and I get to be, like, neurotic noir in the funnest way.
I also like that your character is a little mysterious in her own right and is believably not overblown by his charms.
Absolutely. The priority on that show was its feeling real. Being in Tulsa—our director, Sterlin Harjo, grew up in Oklahoma, and so much of the crew learned their craft on his show “Reservation Dogs.” Everybody really cared about what they were doing. It felt like I really lived in that place with those people. As show business moves more and more toward algorithms, it felt real in a hopeful way.
That reminds me of Gloucester and “Widow’s Bay”—I was reading about how well the production interacted with the locals in the community.
That’s so good to hear. Man, I know by “Widow’s Bay” lore math, it doesn’t make sense for my character to come back, but I’m really hoping they’ll just cheat it.
Thinking about camp and earnestness. The tone of “Widow’s Bay” is partly this creepy horror thing, which normally I don’t like. But you managed to play a character from that “Crucible” era believably, and let her be her own person. Like when she makes that little joke at the beginning and the kid picking her up doesn’t get it and she has to keep smiling.
There are a lot of similarities to “Oh, Mary!” You have to try and be true to the person you’re playing. Because I feel, especially in period pieces, the person must have felt like they were in costume, particularly women. You are dressed like you made a wedding cake out of a curtain store. It’s crazy. There are literal bones and ropes attached to your body, and then a pile of layers of thick garments. You can barely walk. In Brooklyn, we live in a brownstone that was built in the eighteen-fifties, and the female ghosts in my house must watch me roll the trash cans in and out in sweatpants and be flipping me off with their ghost hands.
There’s this one amazing moment, when your character is wailing to the pastor about how she wants to leave the island—and says, “Allow me to wither in my father’s attic! It’s my womanly destiny!”
That was an improv! I’m very proud of that one. It’s not every set where they let your, you know, weird ideas leak out on the third take. They’re really taking a risk.
Your improvised line reminds me of the notion of being in a little conspiracy with the audience, because we’ve all read “Jane Eyre.” The fact that you can believably inhabit someone going through that insane situation but also make a little joke to us—you don’t see that very often.
I tried to play that episode as: she really thinks it’s her “Pride and Prejudice.” Like, the character really thinks, at any moment, it’s going to turn into “Sense and Sensibility” for her.
It’s a very different kind of character than the one you play in “The Lowdown.”
Well, in “The Lowdown,” I play a public defender, and I shadowed a real public defender in the Bronx. They’d be conferring about someone’s fate, and someone would turn and ask me, “Are you a lawyer?” And my face would turn purple, like, Unfortunately, I’m an actor; please just ignore me; I’m so sorry for being here, thank you for your work.
Public defenders often used to be portrayed as hacks who don’t know what they’re doing, which is the opposite of what they actually are.
It’s wild. They could all be fancy corporate lawyers if they wanted to. And they don’t. It is amazing what they do.
How was it working on “The Social Reckoning”?
Great. I only did a handful of scenes, but there’s nobody like Sorkin to write engine and risk and stakes. It feels like a contemporary Shakespeare piece, in that the map in the language is so clear that you really just need to say it loudly and perfectly, and you’re going to look like a good actor. And Jeremy Allen White! What a great actor. He was syllable-perfect. I nerd out when someone is so good. I am working now on this show called “The Roman,” and we did this big group scene where I have my monologue, another person has their monologue. Then a character actor who plays a private investigator blew us all out of the water on the first take, just completely out-acting us all! I felt inspired all week by it.
What’s “The Roman” about?
It’s about a Vegas casino, on Netflix.
Back to Vegas!
Back to Vegas! I’m fully spray-tanned, with fake hair, pushup bra, designer clothes, Bulgari jewelry, and I say a lot of confident, scary things. Then after work I get in the van and I come home and I am a messy-bun, cereal-milk-stained mom who is absolutely at the lowest rung of the totem pole. My daughters treat me like it’s a law firm where I am an intern who has been hired out of nepotism. They’re five and two. So the whiplash—going from making a confident speech in Gucci and stilettos, and then being absolutely disrespected in the home in my pajamas at bath time is . . .
How do you make it work, juggling that?
I feel so fucking lucky to be filming this show in New York. We’re doing a week of exteriors in Vegas, but it’s mostly in Greenpoint, which has been incredible. I play mostly moms, so a lot of times at work I’m with kids who aren’t really my kids. I have a low voice, big tits, and palpable self-loathing, so I’ve been playing mothers for twenty years, but now that I am a mom, it’s even stranger. I am the breadwinner in my house; I’m very proud of it. I want my daughters to see me working. But I definitely wear the dress to wear the pants. I am the breadwinner from playing the wife of breadwinners. I’m sure my daughters will one day write “Please Cancel My Mother” essays at Wesleyan, funded by me taking off my clothes on television. I’m sure that’s what Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” is about.
So your husband was an actor, and is now a nurse.
Yeah. It really upstages my actor problems. I’ll be, like, “Yeah, I had a zit on the side of my face today and they weren’t able to light it out, and I didn’t cry on my closeup, and so I’m going to go into a depression for a month.” And he’s, like, “Well, I saw a human foot in a Crock-Pot today when I was visiting a patient.” All right, well, let’s go back to my problem for a second.
I’d love to hear more about growing up with your parents and what you learned from them.
Especially from being in dressing rooms and backstage with them so much. They’d bring me to tech—twelve-hour rehearsals, working out the lighting onstage. My entry into this industry was connection-based; it seemed to me, like, the reason to get into this is friendship. Having it be about lasting, inexplicable relationships and being hyperconnected to every single person you work with, and the privilege of really, really, really knowing someone in a way that only creativity and shared boredom and trauma can bring. In such a superficial thunderdome, that feels really nice.
At its best, obviously, art is connecting about the vulnerable and interesting good stuff.
If Dolly Parton taught us anything, it’s that you can Trojan Horse something really meaningful in through our candy-coated show.
Are there productions of your parents’ that stand out in your childhood backstage memories?
My dad was in a play called “Intimate Exchanges,” at Hartford Stage, where he’s a dad leaving his family. One of the reasons being an actor is both dangerous and a privilege is that your job is to think about all the different roads your life could take, and all the people that live inside you, and all your potential. The road to your coronation or your downfall. Sometimes I’m, like, Oh, I feel bad for people whose jobs don’t involve that. And sometimes I think maybe we’re not supposed to think these things about ourselves. But seeing my parents examining themselves in that way and connecting with people and putting themselves in vulnerable and silly and meaningful situations. It was a joyful way to grow up.
Honestly, as I start to age out of my looks, I’m excited to return to that joyful part. There’s a confusing thing that happens in this very brief, silly spotlight I’m in now, where it feels a little more like drugs and less like joyful connection. I can see how that can be distracting. I’m excited to see what happens as I get older. I hope my work gets better. I hope my perspective aperture widens. I think about actors like Didi O’Connell, Martha Plimpton, Juliette Lewis, Judith Light, Jane Krakowski, all these people who I look to—their work has just gotten better and better and better.
Did you feel when you were growing up that you wanted to do it, too?
Oh, yeah. I was so pissed at my parents for not letting me be a child star. It was, like, You guys are making a huge mistake. I could have an Oscar by middle school. And you are standing in the way. Now I’m so thankful that they did that. I started working in college. I missed my graduation to do a matinée—“Good Boys and True,” at Second Stage, with Christopher Abbott and J. Smith-Cameron. Then I was a dead body on “Law & Order.” Vincent D’Onofrio just started work on “The Roman,” and I’m debating whether or not to remind him that my first job was a naked dead body he found in an oil barrel on “Criminal Intent,” twenty years ago. And then a year later I was an alive crack addict that he interviewed.
Tell me about your Emmys poem.
Well, we were on the plane ride west, and Hamish Linklater came over to me and asked, Have you prepared anything? I said no. He scared me into writing something. When I tried to write a normal speech, it just felt either too casual or it felt like I was interrupting a Peace Corps prom to talk about my career. So, I was, like, O.K., maybe a poem will be just the right amount of stupid and reverent.
Was the rhyming fun to write?
It was. My husband and I used to write each other silly rhymes like that when we started dating. Most of them were pretty silly and dirty. So it was also my little nod to him. But when they called my name, I thought, Oh, God, I wrote a poem. I’m so sorry.
It was fun. And the Sam Altman zinger gave a little thrill to the audience. Unrelated: You met your husband on the set of something? That sounds cute.
We played brother and sister in a movie and had palpable chemistry, I would say, and it probably ruined the movie. It was called “The Northern Kingdom,” and there’s a scene where he tickles me. I remember at a tiny little film festival where it premièred, you could feel the audience thinking, This is gross. Why is this gross?
That’s happened with actors playing siblings on a couple of TV series—it’s a fine old tradition.
[Checking a text alert.] Oh, my God, they’re trying to deliver my Emmy. But they’re trying to deliver it to my alias, which is Sylvia Plath.
I have to change it because Billie Eilish is about to play her. But it gives me great joy to come down an escalator at the airport to a little-old-man driver in a suit, holding a sign that says “Sylvia Plath.”
What are you excited about for the future?
I want to change the ratio in my life of panic to imagination. The ratio is imbalanced currently. Or, maybe, presentation to imagination. Less scrolling on the toilet in fear, more giggling with compatriots in joy. ♦