After years of playing bimbo roles, Betty Gilpin found her voice in Glow. Now with an essay collection and a feminist take on Watergate, she’s free to make ‘weird choices’
Betty Gilpin has a succinct way of describing what she sees as an “overcorrection” to female characters on screen. “I used to be a bimbo with tits. Suddenly I’m a Magic 8 ball with tits,” she says, referring to the child’s toy that tells fortunes. She clarifies: “I’m 35. The roles that I played 10 years ago used to be the bimbo with no answers. Now, even though I’m playing the therapist wife, I have all the answers about my husband’s problems at his Nasa job. Which is not really realistic, either! It’s just making me one-dimensional in a different way.”
Perhaps more than most actors, Gilpin has spent a lot of time analysing her industry’s treatment of women. Before her thrice Emmy-nominated role in Netflix’s prematurely cancelled female wrestling dramedy Glow, she spent her early career mostly smiling, nodding, taking her top off and being zipped into body bags (including on one occasion being accidentally left zipped inside one after the director called cut on the set of Law & Order).
