Betty Gilpin chases the 'anti-algorithm' roles — and just won an Emmy for it

By Daniel Okafor

Betty Gilpin won an Emmy last month for seven days of work. She's slightly embarrassed about that.

The award honors her guest performance in Widow's Bay, the Apple TV horror-comedy about a possibly cursed island community. In it, Gilpin plays a woman living in the early 1700s whose story sits at the center of the island's dark history. She currently stars opposite Ethan Hawke in Season 2 of the FX noir series The Lowdown, playing a public defender who asks Hawke's self-appointed investigative journalist for help.

Gilpin has worked for more than 20 years, and she says the roles have finally widened. "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," she says. "I was really struck by how much I look like myself."

Her earlier credits, by her own tally, leaned on tropes: "femme fatales and calming wives and evil mistresses."

What makes a project 'anti-algorithm'?

Gilpin describes both Widow's Bay and The Lowdown as projects that resist the industry's safest instincts. "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," she says. "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."

The strangest entry in her recent file: Mary Todd Lincoln. In 2024 Gilpin joined Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola's Broadway farce about the former first lady. She compares the job to giving a yorkie terrier cocaine and 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," she says. "And then [with] Mary Todd in Cole's play, you're being asked to do 105% of what you can do."

How did the Emmy land?

Gilpin's candor about the award is total. "I feel a little embarrassed that that's my Emmy because I worked for seven days on it," she says, noting that TV productions grind for years while people "fry their personal lives and brains and sob through notes and forget to book doctor's appointments."

She adds: "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."

Her breakthrough, of course, was the Netflix wrestling drama GLOW, which earned her three Emmy nominations. Current films include Office Romance and The Social Reckoning. She's also the author of the essay collection All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns.

A dead body, a farce and a private Instagram

Gilpin's first TV role was a corpse: Fran Drescher's daughter on Law & Order, shot in the neck after one alive line. The actor who kills her, Shane McRae, appears in this season of The Lowdown. After 21 years, she says, "it feels like I have cousins all over — cousins with sexual tension and shared trauma — all over this industry."

Her parents were both actors. Her father played "stern lawyer-types — butlers, lawyers, and, like, a reliable, smart man who knew the way." Her mother, Ann McDonough, is "farce incarnate" — so much so that Gilpin calls her Oh, Mary! performance "plagiarism" from her mother's stagecraft.

The Oh, Mary! casting itself came through Escola following her private Instagram, where Gilpin posts trailer videos as a half Blanche Dubois, half Valerie Cherish regional-theater actress. "I guess Cole thought, well, she may just be demented enough to replace me," she says. "It was the experience of my life."

On GLOW, wrestling taught her that her body could be "a functional, powerful thing" rather than a "neck-up thing" — and that the job, like wrestling, is about making your partner look strong. "Our job is to take care of each other in these scenes," she says. "And to find it together."

The through-line is simple. Gilpin keeps choosing the inexplicable over the vanilla car commercial, and the industry, finally, keeps handing her the trophy.