Betty Gilpin on GLOW's Cancellation: 'It Was the Best Job I'll Ever Have'
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“In a world with so much wickedness, I am so very grateful I got to spend three years in Oz.” That’s how actress Betty Gilpin is looking back on her experience with GLOW, a show for which she received three Primetime Emmy nominations.
The Netflix comedy about women’s professional wrestling in the 1980s was unexpectedly cancelled earlier this week despite having already been renewed for a fourth season.
“It was the best job I’ll ever have,” Gilpin writes in an essay for Vanity Fair, a piece she describes as “the musings of a sulking marionette.” And to clarify just how much of a journey this has been for her, Gilpin hearkens back to one of her earlier TV roles — Nurse Jackie‘s oft-disrobed Dr. Carrie Roman. (She doesn’t mention the show by name, but the clues are there.)
“Panicked that I was never going to be able to support myself as an actor, a decade ago I did an arc on a show where you saw my areolas before you saw my face,” she writes. “Avoiding eye contact with ancestors’ ghosts, I bravely signed on to press my t–t against the lens every four frames for Chipotle and weed money, while the other actors did real scenes in between.”
But two of Nurse Jackie‘s writers — Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, who would go on to create GLOW — saw something more in Gilpin at the time. “They went against the bro-mandate and slowly changed the part to an addled character actress instead of a blowup doll to boost ratings,” she writes.
In addition to so many of the behind-the-scenes people who made GLOW happen, Gilpin also thanks a few key cast members. She offers her gratitude to “all the clown-women around me wearing no pants who made me laugh so hard, every day. And in that sea of wild women, Marc Maron and Chris Lowell, two perfect boys I’ll love forever.”
And series star Alison Brie gets the final mention, being called the Scarecrow to Gilpin’s Dorothy “because, of course, I’m going to miss you most of all.”
Did Gilpin’s GLOW eulogy get you sad all over again? Drop a comment with your thoughts on the show’s unexpected cancellation below.
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