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Tribune News Service

Betty Gilpin is not one to complain.
She spent seven months in New Mexico making American Primeval, a gory Western set in the treacherous Utah Territory in 1857, now streaming on Netflix.
She filmed in the elements, often at night, with the most volatile co-stars of all: horses.
The long shoot was nearing completion when Hollywood went on strike in mid-2023, shutting down American Primeval for months. By the time the production resumed in early 2024, Gilpin was six months pregnant with her second child and no longer in a condition to mount a horse. So producers got her a robotic steed.
“It wasn’t the most easy,” is all she will grant.

But by any reasonable measure, making American Primeval was an ordeal. Thankfully, Gilpin had her husband, Cosmo Pfeil, and their daughter, Mary, now four, with her on location.
“That was my grand equaliser,” she says. “I would spend my days screaming bloody murder in a petticoat on a horse, then get home and hunch over in a candy cane position and do bath and bedtime. Being a mom in an Airbnb is way harder than filming on top of a ski mountain in below zero degrees.”
On a rainy morning in December, Gilpin has just arrived at a cafe in New York’s Clinton Hill neighbourhood. In a beetroot-red jumper adorned with a diagram of the uterus, she has already squeezed in a session at the gym and tended to her daughters, including the youngest, now seven months old.
Motherhood, she says, “gives you permanent access, whether you want it or not, to a darker, more rooted self”.
That served her well in American Primeval, in which she plays Sara Rowell, a woman with a mysterious past trying to start a new life on the frontier with her son, Devin (Preston Mota).

With bounty hunters hot on her trail, Sara hires a taciturn stranger named Isaac (Taylor Kitsch) to guide them to safety, which proves elusive in a region where the army, Native Americans, Mormon militiamen and other settlers are locked in a battle for control.
From writer-creator Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), director Peter Berg (Lone Survivor) and executive producer Eric Newman (Narcos), American Primeval offers an unrelentingly violent take on the history of westward expansion.
Later this month, Gilpin will make her Broadway debut as Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary!, taking over for Cole Escola in the bawdy hit that reimagines the doleful US first lady as a batty aspiring cabaret star.
In a strange coincidence of casting, she recently finished shooting the Netflix drama Death by Lightning, in which she portrays Lucretia Garfield, the wife of another doomed 19th-century president.
But there is more to Gilpin – much, much more – than bonnets and hoopskirts.
Since her breakthrough role as a soap star turned professional wrestler in the dearly departed Netflix series Glow, Gilpin has displayed a remarkable range, not only from role to role but also within individual performances.

She moves among genres and time periods with ease and she gravitates to layered roles that showcase her versatility: in the inventive sci-fi comedy Mrs. Davis, she plays a time-travelling nun fighting a sentient form of artificial intelligence.
In the recent Three Women, based on Lisa Taddeo’s book of the same name, she portrays Lina, a neglected Indiana housewife struggling with chronic pain and unmet desire.
Acting was “always sort of destined”, says Gilpin, whose parents, Jack Gilpin and Ann McDonough, though not household names, have worked steadily in film, TV and theatre for decades; her dad plays Church the butler on HBO’s The Gilded Age.
Raised in New York and Connecticut, she attended Fordham University in New York, where she studied acting. She then spent roughly a decade working off-Broadway and cycling through small roles in indie movies and TV procedurals.
A guest stint on Nurse Jackie, where she befriended writers Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, led to Glow. Her performance in the nostalgic ’80s dramedy was notable for its intense physicality – she body-slammed like a pro – and the way Gilpin’s character Debbie Eagan channelled her personal anguish into her wrestling persona, an all-American bombshell known as Liberty Belle.

The part earned Gilpin three Emmy nominations and a legion of new fans, including comedian Matt Rogers.
“I just couldn’t ignore the fact that it was one of the best performances I have probably seen, ever – just the sheer versatility of it,” says Rogers, who co-hosts the podcast “Las Culturistas” with Bowen Yang.
“As an audience member, whether you’re reading the book she wrote [All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns, published in 2022] or watching her on-screen, you are well fed.”
Production on season four of Glow was under way when the onset of Covid-19 shut it down in March 2020; Netflix abruptly cancelled the show later that year.
While some roles can feel fleeting or elusive, with Lina, the unhappy housewife who embarks on a passionate affair with her high-school boyfriend in Three Women, there was “an eerie clarity” the whole time, Gilpin says.
“It’s probably the most connected I’ve ever been to a character.”

The actress brings similarly unexpected colours to Sara in American Primeval.
Its director Berg says the series was “the most brutal thing I’ve ever done”. When he found out that Gilpin would be returning from the strike six months pregnant, he thought they might have to drastically rewrite the remainder of the series.
Instead, “she was leading the charge every day, up and down that mountain, pregnant, with a smile on her face”, he says, adding, with only a trace of hyperbole, “Betty Gilpin is a true American legend.”
The director, who often encourages improvisation on set, says Gilpin found ways to bring much-needed humour and sweetness to the grim material.
“She would look at me every once in a while and say, ‘You know, it’s not going to kill any of us to laugh a little bit with this show. It can’t be all scalpings, shootings, bear attacks and drownings. We should be able to find some moments to laugh and to feel love. She found both of those.”

Kitsch recalls how Gilpin improvised a tender scene in which Sara gently teases Isaac for having a discernible heartbeat. (“I won’t tell anyone,” she says.)
He praises Gilpin as an instinctual performer whose meticulous preparation – including working with a dramaturge who creates a syllabus of readings to help her get into a character’s mindset – enables her “to just let go and not worry about a bad take or repercussions. She just swings,” he says.
“She was always game on, just super focused on the work and trying to get the best out of the day.”
For now, Gilpin is focused on donning Lincoln’s bratty curls and putting her mark on the role that has made Escola the toast of Broadway.
“I keep waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, ‘What am I doing?’” she says.
In an email, Escola remembers being immediately struck by Gilpin in Glow.
“She has that mix of toughness and vulnerability that I typically associate with Old Hollywood broads.”

The nonbinary playwright and actor is also a fan of a character that Gilpin occasionally portrays on her private Instagram account, whom Gilpin describes as “a delusional, out-of-touch regional theatre actress who is in her dressing room a half-hour before curtain”.
When Escola began to think about a replacement, Gilpin seemed like an obvious choice: “Betty is a capital-A actress with her own unique palette as an artist. I don’t know how [the character] will change yet but it will. She understands comedy and cares deeply about the heart of this character. That’s all that matters.”
Oh, Mary! captures the fact that “we are all overlooked, unique geniuses and delusional mediocre idiots at the same time”, Gilpin says. “I will probably be both in the show.”
Gilpin finds comfort knowing that, coincidentally, both her close friend Cristin Milioti (The Penguin) and her father made their Broadway debuts on the stage where she will make hers.
A few weeks ago, she went to the theatre for a fitting, and the sensory experience – the crackle of the speaker backstage, the scrape of the hangers being moved across a costume rack – made her tear up.
“It feels like a return to the reason I’m on this earth, honestly,” she says. “Not to sound too insanely out of touch.”


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Betty Gilpin (right) and Chloe Lysenko in a still from the new Netflix TV series American Primeval. Gilpin also recently finished shooting the coming Netflix drama Death by Lightning. Photo: TNS

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The Glow star, who filmed parts of Netflix’s new Western series six months pregnant, will make her Broadway debut this month in Oh, Mary!


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