Betty Gilpin seeks out 'anti-algorithm' projects, like 'The Lowdown' and 'Widow's Bay'

In more than 20 years of acting, Betty Gilpin's roles have fit into a variety of tropes, including "femme fatales and calming wives and evil mistresses." But recently she's been offered a wider range of opportunities.

"One of the many benefits of aging is that you sort of age out of being an archetype, like your id sort of seeps through — whether you like it or not. ... I was really struck by how much I look like myself," she says of her current role starring opposite Ethan Hawke in Season 2 of the FX noir series The Lowdown.

Gilpin's character on The Lowdown is a public defender who asks for help from Hawke's character, the self-appointed investigative journalist. Last month, she won an Emmy Award for her guest performance in the Apple TV series, Widow's Bay, a horror-comedy about an island community that may actually be cursed. Her character was a woman living in the early 1700s, whose story was a vital part of the island's dark history.

"I feel like there are many parallels between Widow's Bay and Lowdown [in] that they're so sort of anti-algorithm," Gilpin says. "There's an understandable pull in my industry to make things that are kind of like a gleaming vanilla car commercial, like super safe, super familiar, appeal to the masses. ... And [then there are] people that are out there who are like, I'm actually going to go the other way and make something so inexplicable and strange ... and weird and unrecognizable."

In 2024, Gilpin brought her brand of weird to Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola's Broadway farce about the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln — a role she compares to giving a yorkie terrier cocaine and then telling the dog to "go on as Hamlet's understudy inside the Coliseum."

"There's so many jobs that feel like you're being asked to do 5% of what you can do and that can be really, really hard and sad. And then [with] Mary Todd in Cole's play, you're being asked to do 105% of what you can do," she says.

Gilpin's breakthrough role was on the Netflix series, GLOW, which earned her three Emmy nominations. Her current films include Office Romance and The Social Reckoning. She's also the author of a collection of essays called All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns. 

Interview highlights

On winning an Emmy Award for her guest performance on Widow's Bay

I feel a little embarrassed that that's my Emmy because I worked for seven days on it. I know that, like, people who make TV shows, it's a years-long, extremely difficult, arduous process where people fry their personal lives and brains and sob through notes and forget to book doctor's appointments for themselves because they are working all hours, making this possible. And then I came in and memorized some lines and crossed my eyes and left and I got a trophy. ...

I feel very lucky that it's happened now and not 10, 15 years ago. I think while I'm so happy and excited and feel so lucky, there was not one cell in me that was like, "Yes, finally!" It was just a really nice night. And then I was excited to go home to my daughters.

On growing up with actor parents 

My dad [played] sort of stern lawyer-types — butlers, lawyers, and, like, a reliable, smart man who knew the way. My mom is just farce incarnate. She's the funniest person on Earth. So much of my Oh, Mary! performance is just plagiarism from [my mother] Ann McDonough. ...

I think [there was] an Agatha Christie play where she was a maid and — it was certainly not in the script — she just had to exit and she made a choice where she just slowly pulled up her dress so you could see her knees and she's sort of, like, pointed her pelvis towards her male scene partner and kind of reverse crab walked away from him in a weird, haunted, sultry, farcical maid way. And it brought the house down in a not-comedy. People couldn't breathe, they were laughing so hard. ...

It was a profound and strange way to grow up. I saw my parents put themselves in many different people's shoes, and it expands the possibility of your life and makes you curious about the different lives that your parents have and that you could have, and I wanted to have all of them — and now I'm addicted to it.

Daniel Rampulla /

On how she replaced Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! 

[It was] a total insane fluke of the timeline of the world. Cole and I had never met, but they followed me on Instagram. I have a private Instagram. And it's me in my trailer, basically, in various jobs in my career, in various crazy costumes. And I'm pretending that I am a sort of half Blanche Dubois, half Valerie Cherish from The Comeback ... a regional theater actress losing her mind in her dressing room at half hour before some play that she's about to do. And I guess Cole thought, well, she may just be demented enough to replace me in Oh, Mary!, to be the guinea pig to see if it would work without Cole. They offered me the part. It was so insane that day getting that call, and it was the experience of my life.

On why she's been in so many period pieces

I can probably credit my mom's whimsy and dad's diction. And I went to theater school where we trained for four years and were told, like, get ready for all the Shakespeare parts! And my experience was I graduated and it was the era of the pixie dream girl. I think often my training and gravitas or ... palpable self-loathing and pain in my eyes translates to oldie-timey?

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On her first TV role, in which she played a dead body on Law & Order

It was my honor to be a dead body. I did have one alive line. I was Fran Drescher's daughter, but then I got a gunshot to the neck pretty quickly. … The guy who kills me is Shane McRae, who is in this season of The Lowdown. It can feel like being an actor is a series of controlled connections. Like your job is to hyper-connect with people and then say goodbye to them. Now, having done this for 21 years, it feels like I have cousins all over, well, maybe not cousins — cousins with sexual tension and shared trauma — all over this industry, and it feels so wonderful. It's such a privilege.

On how her role in the wrestling drama GLOW changed her relationship to her body 

It was really the first time I thought about my body being a functional, powerful thing. And it completely changed the way I thought about approaching a part, that it could be a head-to-toe thing, versus a neck-up thing. I had an acting teacher once tell me that I was "a good actor from the neck up and scared Betty from the shoulders down" — and he was right on. I just felt so disconnected from my body. Not that that's all fixed now, but wrestling really helped, just to be as simultaneously stupid and powerful as possible.

I had assigned it in my mind that wrestling was all about macho and hyper masculine and these guys must have huge egos. ... [But] it's all about vulnerability. It's not gonna look real unless you make your partner look like the strongest person who's ever touched you. That's what makes a good actor, that they understand that the best version of something is finding music between you versus you looking like the coolest poster possible. Wrestling felt like kind of this meta exercise of reminder that our job is to take care of each other in these scenes and to find it together.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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