Bringing a new ’80s ‘GLOW’ to a TV near you
Training upped girls’ confidence on- and off-screen
Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin wrestle with fitness, Capezio tights and big hair in their new Netflix series
Seeking an acting gig that would test her limits physically, Alison Brie found all the power bombs and headlocks she ever dreamed of with GLOW.
The 1980s-set Netflix wrestling comedy (streaming Friday) brings together 14 women in various stages of career desperation to become the mainstays of a lean, mean pro-wrestling TV show, and the challenge mirrors the experience of Brie and her Spandex-clad castmates as they hopped in the ring and got ready to rumble.
“Before we knew each other’s last names, we were grabbing each other’s thighs and butts and rubbing our faces in each other’s armpits. It was definitely a crash course,” says GLOW co- star Betty Gilpin.
“It’s nice feeling like you know something about yourself that the world doesn’t quite know yet,” Brie adds about learning to be a pro wrestler. “You are aware of what you’re capable of, and it’s your secret.”
Based on the Reagan-era Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling,
GLOW centers on the group of misfits cast by has-been B-movie director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) that has to learn the ins and outs of flying elbows and body slams while juggling personal issues, dealing with financial obstacles and getting their in-ring characters ready for the big TV debut.
Ruth (Brie) is a stage-trained actress with no luck in Hollywood, while her best friend Debbie (Gilpin) struggles after leaving the role of soap-opera sex object behind for motherhood.
A bad decision creates a deep rift, but the frenemies figure out a new dynamic in the ring, with Debbie adopting an all-American Hulk Hogan-type character oppo- site Ruth’s Soviet supervillainess.
The wrestling world they enter is “an amazing theatrical specta- cle that’s emotionally charged and completely unique,” Maron says. “How can you not love watching the big hair and the leotards and the women going at it yelling and screaming? It’s very powerful.”
Creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch ( Nurse Jackie) were children of the ’80s, but unfamiliar with the original GLOW. “It was a sweet spot for a 10- to 14-year-old boy,” says Mensch. But both women were attracted to how empowering — but also uncom- fortably exploitative — wrestling can be.
“We try to lean into both, because that tension is where a lot of the nuance of the show lies in terms of how exposed the women are, in leotards and half-naked, but also who’s watching them, and who they are wrestling for,” says Flahive.
Before GLOW, Gilpin says she worked out mostly to “look less terrible in jeans,” but Brie had long been a fitness nut. Knowing she had four weeks to prepare former Community star Brie upped her weight training and pull-up regimen.
Learning the basics in the ring, from running the ropes to perfecting stances, was important, though “I was dying to get into these bigger moves,” Brie says.
Gilpin almost cried after doing a sunset flip on her wrestler teacher — a move the actress describes as “flipping over him and credit-carding his butt with my face” — for the first time: “I felt like I could lift a car. It changed my entire life.”
That self-confidence hasn’t subsided. On set, “we were wearing essentially glittery diapers and Capezio tights, and walking around like we were in power suits,” Gilpin says. And since
GLOW, “I merge on the highway with more confidence after spending time with these women, let alone just being a stronger woman in my daily life.”
“I felt like I could lift a car. It changed my entire life.” Betty Gilpin