Betty Gilpin seeks out ‘anti-algorithm’ projects, like ‘The Lowdown’ and ‘Widow’s Bay’

In more than 20 years of acting, Betty Gilpin’s roles have fit into a variety of tropes, including “femme fatales and calming wives and evil mistresses.” But recently she’s been offered a wider range of opportunities.

“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. … I was really struck by how much I look like myself,” she says of her current role starring opposite Ethan Hawke in Season 2 of the FX noir series The Lowdown.

Gilpin’s character on The Lowdown is a public defender who asks for help from Hawke’s character, the self-appointed investigative journalist. Last month, she won an Emmy Award for her guest performance in the Apple TV series, Widow’s Bay, a horror-comedy about an island community that may actually be cursed. Her character was a woman living in the early 1700s, whose story was a vital part of the island’s dark history.

“I feel like there are many parallels between Widow’s Bay and Lowdown [in] that they’re so sort of anti-algorithm,” Gilpin says. “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. … 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.”

In 2024, Gilpin brought her brand of weird to Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola‘s Broadway farce about the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln — a role she compares to giving a yorkie terrier cocaine and then 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. And then [with] Mary Todd in Cole’s play, you’re being asked to do 105% of what you can do,” she says.