No./11 From singing hymns to fighting the algorithm
MRS. DAVIS star Betty Gilpin on playing a motorcycleriding nun and anti-a.i. warrior
MRS. DAVIS IS the kind of show that’s hard to put in a box. Co-created by The Leftovers’ and Lost’s Damon Lindelof and The Big Bang Theory’s Tara Hernandez, the story follows a formidable nun’s battle against Mrs. Davis — a creepy, all-seeing A.I. — with the help of her ex, Wiley (Jake Mcdorman). But it also tackles the big themes of religion, technology and philosophy. It’s a tricky role for any actor, but Betty Gilpin isn’t one to shy away from a challenge, whether she’s landing dropkicks as an ’80s wrestler in GLOW or outsmarting killers in Lindelof-scripted survivalist horror The Hunt. She tells Empire how she harnessed the habit.
FINDING THE FAITH
In order to dive into a show that handles, in Gilpin’s words, “11 genres that deal with 57 themes”, the actor investigated her character Simone’s faith and what a woman of God looks like today. “I think the nuns that we’re used to seeing on screen are, like, haunted ghost-nuns who eat children’s faces,” she laughs of how they’re usually portrayed. Gilpin’s father is an actor-turned-episcopalian priest, and via him she connected with some nuns on Zoom. “I had this idea in my head of nuns existing out of time,” she remembers. What she found was that these women were cutting out certain parts of life in order to hyper-connect with the good stuff. “It’s like they were living meditations, and seemed very feminist to me.”
CHALLENGING TECH
On the surface, Mrs Davis is a benevolent A.I. that users are in constant communication with through their headphones. “The majority of people think she’s doing only good; there’s not this kind of Black Mirror doom-scrolling,” explains Gilpin. A self-professed cat-video-sharer who is “drowning in the matrix like everyone else”, Gilpin says Mrs. Davis made her interrogate what technology means to people today. “We’re playing with fire by having answers and distractions in our pocket all the time,” she says. “We’re sealing off access to those intangible, fantastical, dark and mysterious, wonderful things about life.”
GETTING PHYSICAL
Simone moonlights as a horse-riding vigilante before Mrs. Davis catches up with her. Luckily, some rule-bending was permitted when it came to the costume, to accommodate extracurricular butt-kicking. “Thank God that [costume designer] Susie Coulthard came up with her wearing pants instead of it being a full-dress habit,” says Gilpin. The habit was only the half of it, however; the bigger challenge was working with a particularly tricky co-star. “The horse couldn’t have hated me more,” she laughs. “He sneezed on me one day; snot all across my face like it was a Nickelodeon show in the ’90s. He’s a sweet boy, but it was horrible.” Some sidekicks just can’t handle the hoof.