Betty Gilpin on the ‘brilliant scripts’ of ‘Mrs. Davis’: ‘It’s like Wile E. Coyote Shakespeare’ [Complete Interview Transcript]

Latasha Ford and Marcus James Dixon
·17 min read
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During a recent Gold Derby video interview, digital director Christopher Rosen spoke in-depth with Betty Gilpin (“Mrs. Davis”) about her Peacock limited series, which is eligible at the 2023 Emmys. Watch the full video above and read the complete interview transcript below.

The actress plays Sister Simone, a nun who goes on a quest to find the Holy Grail in order to defeat artificial intelligence, in the hit show co-created by Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez. “Mrs. Davis” asks a lot of questions about human nature and its predisposition to seek out validation even in the face of the truth proving the opposite.

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Gilpin highlighted the “brilliant scripts” of “Mrs. Davis” in our webchat, noting how “they read like graphic novels.” She later added, “It’s like Wile E. Coyote Shakespeare. It really is. It feels like text instead of just quippy or zany. It really felt like we were Looney Tunes Hamletting in the best way, in a way I’ve been waiting for.”

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Christopher Rosen: Welcome back to Gold Derby. I’m Christopher Rosen. I’m so pleased to be joined by Betty Gilpin, a three-time Emmy Award nominee who stars on the Peacock series, Mrs. Davis, was just finished this week. We’re recording this on Friday. Betty, I love the show. I haven’t been able to stop really thinking about it since I saw the screeners.

Betty Gilpin: There’s a lot to unpack mentally.

CR: So much to unpack. One of the things I was thinking of in the finale, obviously Simone has to make this really incredible choice to drink from the grail, to destroy it, and then also destroy Mrs. Davis. And I think the theme of the show I found really compelling to me was that human nature is to gravitate towards stuff that tells us what we want to maybe hear, and whether that’s media or religion or AI in this case or whatever it is, that we repeat those themes. So knowing that’s human nature and then having to play against that for Simone, and in that sequence I just found it’s so compelling and you were so incredible.

BG: Thanks.

CR: So, I guess just to start there, how did you think about that push-pull of human nature versus her knowing what to do there, I guess?

BG: Well, yeah, I mean I think about the brilliant scripts that Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof wrote along with the writer’s room, the themes that they delved into, it really made me think about, okay, so the church and the internet as two separate things. It’s really us that misuse them probably or create these institutions that go against what they were probably originally designed for. Not being a person of faith myself, but probably it was supposed to be used as asking big questions and wandering and connecting and probably the internet as well. We could be using it to explore gray areas and get smarter and connect with people. And we just, we’re really good at using these separate institutions as wish fulfillment echo chambers instead of these vessels for exploration and existential thought. I think for Simone, when we meet her in episode one, she probably believed herself to be at the end of her catharsis learning lesson arc, that she was doing it right and she was a person of faith and a nun. And I think that she finds in her interaction with the outside world that she was really compartmentalizing her nundom and kind of using falafel as this sort of workaround to real faith and risk and vulnerability. And I think that people use the internet in that way too, that it’s this sort of option to sidestep doing internal vulnerable risk in terms of figuring out who you are or what you want. Yeah, it’s easy to have something in your pocket just being this sort of validation, scrolling, echo chamber thing in a world where we’re so lonely and depressed and freaked out.

CR: It really is. And I mean, I think that’s what I found so compelling about it. You mentioned from the first episode, Simone is like this. I think from minute one, you are locked in on this character and in the pocket and the show is perfect for you and I think you’re perfect for the show and the tone and all these different things. I was reading another interview, you kind of called it “the scripts are not actor proof,” which I found really interesting and I think that’s true. And for you, I guess as the lead and really as the person out in front of this, I guess, how did you think about that and your responsibility in playing the different tones and all the stuff you just said, expressing that in a character and a show that’s really entertaining and fun and all these different things? I just found it, again, a great tightrope walk and you’re just killing it. So I guess, how did you think about that and go about it basically?

BG: Yeah, I mean these scripts, I think maybe from starting in theater I have this probably a combination of laziness and vanity, this habit of I skip the stage directions and just read the dialogue and then I make myself go back and read the full script. And these scripts, they read like graphic novels. Even the most minute stage direction, every syllable is intentional and builds this crazy, complicated, beautiful, specific, original world. So really from the first stage direction description, I was put exactly in this genre that they were inventing. And when I say that the scripts aren’t actor proof, I mean it’s like Wile E. Coyote Shakespeare. It really is. It feels like text instead of just quippy or zany. It really felt like we were Looney Tunes Hamletting in the best way, in a way I’ve been waiting for. And I feel like in my own way throughout my whole career, I’ve been getting the note, not in those words, but the subtext from the director was like, “This ain’t Looney Tunes Hamlet. Just say, where were you on the night of X? Stop crossing your eyes and stopping.” And in this one I was like, finally I’m home. Also, it really felt there was this sense on set that every single department felt so passionate about creating that specific world down to the props department. So when you feel that level of everyone is stepping up and going out on a limb, it makes you do it creatively as well. Gosh, it was my favorite experience I’ve ever, ever had.

CR: I mean, it’s great to hear and I think it comes through certainly in the work and as a viewer I felt like it definitely succeeds on that aspect because it’s a very enjoyable watch as well. I wanted to ask you, at the risk of just being talking about this scene, there’s a couple of scenes I absolutely love and your performance in them is incredible. So in the finale, Simone meets the creator of Mrs. Davis, Joy, and I love that because it reminded me a little bit of a scene. I think it ended up being probably your last scene in Glow when you’re talking to Ruth and you’re just kind of like… Your expressions, you’re vibrating a little bit. It’s just so great. And in this, the frustration Simone feels hearing that this is a Buffalo Wild Wings app gone mad, I just love it. And you’re able to get so much frustration and just, like you said, like Looney Tunes all over with rarely not any dial. I just love it so much. I just thought about you doing that scene, because I just thought it was unbelievably well done.

BG: Thank you so much. I mean, yeah, that was such a fun scene to shoot and I think it was so brilliant that, so finale spoilers, we discover that Mrs. Davis is not this ominous HAL-like supercomputer. It was a beta app for Buffalo Wild Wings and is really just this kind of very simple, somewhat childlike robot thing that just wants to make the user in front of it happy and that it has more to do with a reflection of who you are and what you want rather than this other thing that needed to be destroyed. I think part of Simone’s roiling anger and frustration was that part of her none workaround, I think she didn’t want to do the part where it was almost like she was a dry drunk in a way. She wanted to sidestep the part where she had to do digging into her own psyche and work out her own issues. She was like, well, what if I just visit falafel and hang out with Margo Martindale and just not see the corner of the world, but I have my middle finger up to still. And I think realizing that this thing that she had cast as the villain in her life maybe wasn’t a villain, that maybe the negativity and the battles to be won were internal, I think was so frustrating to her. When I myself think about AI in our world, I think there’s so many parallels that it really has more to do with our thesis statement as a humanity rather than this other thing that we can blame everything on over there. Somebody said that’s why that show is called Black Mirror, that it’s just the thing that’s reflecting us, we can’t blame it.

CR: Yeah, I think, well, I mean it’s funny because it’s like, man, it’s so easy to be so cynical in the show and it ends up really being hopeful, I think, at least ends on a hopeful note, which is great, but it is so easy to be so cynical about just messed up humanity at this point with all of these different things, but-

BG: Yes, but there is something I really love about our show is the joy in it and is… I think about reading these scripts and how incredible the writing is. There’s something that I think gets missed in honestly promoting stuff. It feels very, like the things I was drawn to when I first got into acting, watching my parents in plays, I would watch two actors on stage create something between them that was inexplicable, this fizz happening between two people. You feel that when you fall in love or hang out with a little kid or something, there’s like this invisible electricity. And I think that that is what good writing captures, that their job is to put on paper this invisible fizz between us all, this sort of electric web between all of us as humans. And it’s strange because in the promoting of a project, it’s all about the self and it’s so hard to describe that fizz. And I think that’s why people are drawn to good TV and movies. It’s not because they’re drawn to abs or vanity, they’re drawn to the connections. And I think that that’s something that AI doesn’t understand and that people who don’t value good writing don’t understand. So amen to the WGA.

CR: Yes, I think that’s a very good note there. Another great scene, again, just to go through the scenes and not just to go through the scenes, but to go through the scenes.

BG: Let’s do it.

CR: When Simone, and forgive me because I forget what episode it is because I watched them all immediately when I got the screeners to binge it very quickly because I just loved it so much-

BG: That’s great.

CR: But it’s when Simone finds out from Mrs. Davis, I guess for the first… I think you are without a proxy. So you’re listening to her for the first time and Simone finds out what happens to her father. And I just found that is a tremendously heartbreaking scene. I just love the way your face is registering these slight changes that are incredibly emotional things for Simone to hear. I definitely teared up watching it and you’re so good at it.

BG: Thanks.

CR: I guess how did… And especially I love the way, again, you’re saying the great writing, the way that we find out what obviously you heard later on in the season, which it’s just a great reveal and it’s just so well put together. But I guess specifically that scene, what were you actually hearing there, I guess just from a basic level and then can you talk through that performance and that sequence? Because it’s just really good.

BG: Thank you so much. That might be one of my favorite scenes in the whole show. It’s end of episode six directed by Alethea Jones, genius. Yeah, I wasn’t hearing anything technically. In fact, a lot of times in the proxy scenes, the AirPods would make beeping sounds and you could see the actor proxying be like, “Do I say something? Will I get in trouble if I say something? This is so distracting.” And then be like, “It’s beeping. I can’t remember my next line.” Thankfully it didn’t beep for me. Part of what I love about the character of Simone is that I feel like oftentimes I either play super vulnerable, arms open women or wry, sardonic, arms crossed, eyebrow raised women. And I think that Simone, while she has these cement walls still up and the middle finger to the sky in some ways, her faith has really dissolved one of those walls, one of those Celeste built walls that Celeste engineered. And despite every fiber of her carefully-crafted identity has made her hopeful and love a corner of the world that she thought she wouldn’t and still want things like connection from her mom and her dad and Wiley. I think at heart we’re all still our little six-year-old selves being like, “But Mom and Dad, you love me, right?” And I think seeing Simone insist that she didn’t care about any of that stuff and that she had swept it all under the rug and that it didn’t exist to her anymore, I think in that moment she’s missed her dad so much. And so hearing that there was possibility that he did live through the funeral, he wasn’t killed in the Lazarus Shroud, and then kind of the rollercoaster of things that I was pretending to hear. And her for the first time receiving from Mrs. Davis, why people love her. She was receiving, yes, truth, but also comfort and probably in a very soothing voice. That’s something I think is interesting about the finale that when once Simone has drank from the grail and severed her connection to falafel, there’s sort of this vacuum, she’s not in the epilogue of her life. She’s not a solidified person of faith without constant proof of falafel. Will she be a good person of faith? I don’t know. But I think there’s this vacuum where probably it would be very tempting to then turn to Mrs. Davis, this thing who is just wanting to give you that solace that she now no longer has in falafel.

CR: It’s great. We have to wrap up, but I wanted to ask you about, you mentioned Celeste and Elizabeth Marvel plays her. She’s so great and the thing I love about her performance and the character is, like you were saying, I think a great thing about the show is as a viewer and a fan of your work, I’m like, you are getting to do things that you don’t always get to do. And I think she in this, it’s a different… She’s throwing stuff at you that I don’t normally see characters get to throw at characters you play, I guess. And I just found that really great because it’s really kind of throwing Simone back on her heels a little bit, right?

BG: Totally.

CR: Because she cannot run it basically against Celeste. And I just love, yeah, they’re interplaying their relationship. And I guess I think you guys have a great rapport together too. So I’d just love to hear you talk a little about that and how you worked together to kind of create that relationship.

BG: Yeah. I mean, Beth Marvel, I have been nerd obsessed with for forever. I’ve seen her in a ton of plays in New York, and when I was in college, would see her in stuff and was just, she was my idol on stage. And I think that her performance in this, she’s just so, this is such a lame word to use, describing acting, but so real and takes everything so gravitasly seriously, even when she’s describing Monty being burned alive by acid in the Lazarus Shroud. And I think that for Simone, those scenes with her, I mean, maybe we all feel this way talking to a parent or family member sometimes where it’s like a physical manifestation of a part of you that you pretend isn’t a part of you, but is a central pillar to you. And that frustration of like, I’m not you, but oh, I am. You’re in my bones, you’re half my bones. She just was so… I think part of what our show does so brilliantly is, you could be on this individual quest and have the script of your life going in your head and your specific memoir chapter, and maybe your Mrs. Davis is feeding into that narrative. But then the people around you, particularly family or people who have known you forever are the first to be like, “What are you doing? What? A whale? Sorry, the holy grail?” I think Simone doesn’t need help feeling like what she’s doing is ridiculous. But Beth Marvel was so good at just twisting the knife. Yeah, one of my favorite actors I’ve ever worked with for sure.

CR: Yeah, it’s great. You guys are so great together. It’s funny because what you said there is so true. As a parent, I’m like, I see me and my daughter and then also I know I see my mom and me and I’m just like, oh god, this is such a nightmare.

BG: I know.

CR: What am I doing?

BG: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I have a two and a half year old. The other day for the first time she was sighing looking out the window and I was like, “What’s wrong?” She goes, “Nothing.” I was like, oh god, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me. Oh no, you’re only two and a half. That’s bad.

CR: I feel like, again, we could talk about this show for so long, but we do have to wrap up. Betty Gilpin, this is an incredible performance and the show is so great. Mrs. Davis, you can stream all the episodes on Peacock and if you haven’t done so, I hope you do and then come back and we’ll watch the spoilery stuff here if you skip that. But thank you so much, Betty. Appreciate it.

BG: Thank you. Thanks, Christopher.

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