Check out the photo gallery to see 900 screencaps of Betty Gilpin from her guest appearance on the short-lived TV show, Past Life!

Admiring Betty Gilpin supports the SAG-AFTRA strike.

The nearly 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents all performers on film and television, are going on strike.

On Thursday, the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) announced its national board voted unanimously to launch the guild’s first strike. The news was unveiled by SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher and National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland during a press conference, following the expiration of the union’s current contract and a 12-day extension of contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP).

Why are the actors going on strike?
The short answer is because the SAG-AFTRA bargaining committee and AMPTP could not reach an agreement to form a new contract after their previous one expired on June 30.

But the reasons for a strike are many. SAG-AFTRA has faced a host of radical changes as the industry has pivoted away from more traditional models of theatrical distribution and network and cable television in favor of streaming. The issues at hand include the use of AI in generating and perpetuating actors’ likenesses, as well as residuals and data transparency for streaming projects. Other points of conflict are also salaries, particularly for guest stars, costars, and background actors, as rising inflation and the cost of living increasingly prevent many working actors from earning a living wage.

Drescher summed up the reasons for a strike in a press conference speech. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us,” she said. “I cannot believe it, quite frankly. How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right while giving hundreds and millions of dollars to their CEOS. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.”

She continued: “The entire business model has been changed by streaming, digital, AI. This is a moment of history that is a moment of truth. If we don’t stand tall right now, we are going to be in trouble. We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines and big business, who cares more about wall street than you and your family.”

#SAGAFTRAstrong #SAGAFTRAstrike

Mrs. Davis was nominated at the 2023 HCA TV Awards! Due to the ongoing WGA strike and the SAG/AFTRA strike looming, winners of the 2023 HCA TV Awards will no longer be presented on August 12th and August 13th. Presentation of the HCA TV Awards Winners is TBD.

Best Streaming Limited Series
Beef (Netflix) Black Bird (Apple TV+)
Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (Netflix)
Daisy Jones and The Six (Prime Video)
Fleishman Is In Trouble (FX on Hulu)
Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Netflix)
Mrs. Davis (Peacock)
Ms. Marvel (Disney+)
Tiny Beautiful Things (Hulu)
Welcome to Chippendales (Hulu)

Source: Awards Radar

Betty Gilpin and Mrs.Davis have received nominations at the 2023 Television Critics Association Awards! The winners of the TCA Awards will be announced August 7, 2023.

INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT IN DRAMA
Christine Baranski, “The Good Fight” – Paramount+
Kieran Culkin, “Succession” – HBO | Max
Dominique Fishback, “Swarm” – Prime Video
Betty Gilpin, “Mrs. Davis” – Peacock
Pedro Pascal, “The Last of Us” – HBO | Max
Bella Ramsey, “The Last of Us” – HBO | Max
Rhea Seehorn, “Better Call Saul” – AMC
Sarah Snook, “Succession” – HBO | Max
Jeremy Strong, “Succession” – HBO | Max

OUTSTANDING NEW PROGRAM
“Andor” – Disney+
“Interview With the Vampire” – AMC
“Jury Duty” – Amazon Freevee
“Mrs. Davis” – Peacock
“Poker Face” – Peacock
“Shrinking” – Apple TV+
“The Bear” – FX
“The Last of Us” – HBO | Max

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN MOVIES, MINISERIES OR SPECIALS
“A Small Light” – National Geographic
“Beef” – Netflix
“Black Bird” – Apple TV+
“Daisy Jones & The Six” – Prime Video
“Fleishman Is in Trouble” – FX
“Mrs. Davis” – Peacock
“The Patient” – FX
“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” – The Roku Channel

Actress Betty Gilpin not only embraced the wild tonal shifts of the wholly unique Peacock series “Mrs. Davis,” she says she finds the show’s ability to vacillate between comedy, drama, sci-fi and even absurdity much more true to life than the confines of a single genre box.

“The show cycles through genres every two pages,” Gilpin says in the latest episode of TheWrap’s “How She Did It,” presented by Peacock. “I find that much more true to life than when a show is one tone, one color. Throughout a given day, how many different genres do you cycle through in your life? Things can feel like slapstick farce, and then you get a phone call and you’re in a heightened drama. That’s much more true to life. It’s 10 different worlds and 30 different storylines and 11 different thesis statements braided together.”

Boiling the plot of “Mrs. Davis” into a simple logline isn’t all that easy, but the show begins as the story of a nun (played by Davis) who has a vendetta against an all-powerful A.I. on which the entire world depends. After conversing with the A.I. (called Mrs. Davis), it agrees to shut itself down if Davis can do one thing: Find the Holy Grail.

And that’s just in the first episode.

“I had worked with Damon Lindelof on ‘The Hunt’, drawn to his writing style, strange and original but so specific and felt so real to me even though it was so strange and fantastical,” Gilpin said of her attraction to the project, which was created by Lindelof and Tara Hernandez. “That was the kind of world I wanted to be in for seven months.”

Gilpin said the passion for the show’s unique storytelling seeped into every department.

“It felt really special to be part of a very original thorny, strange, ridiculous, wonderful world that was so specific,” she said. “You could really feel every department wanting to be very much a part of that. It was sort of everyone’s passion project. Everyone really got it.”

As for the looming threat of A.I. in the real world, Gilpin was drawn to the show’s unique take on A.I.

“Part of the thesis statement of the show is that Mrs. Davis is not some HAL super computer, other evil. It’s really just a robot puppy that’s fulfilling our wants and our needs, that we are in charge of and at the wheel of. And whether that’s more comforting or scarier is the question we should be asking ourselves.”

“Mrs. Davis” is streaming on Peacock.

Last year when Betty Gilpin was filming Mrs. Davis, the Peacock dramedy about a nun who vows to destroy a powerful artificial intelligence, people were barely even talking about ChatGPT — it was, as Gilpin described, “niche.” Now, as audiences binge the show, it’s the topic on everyone’s mind. “As a parent in real life, I think a lot about our dependence on the internet, and I do think it’s natural for humans to want a workaround to risk,” she says. “But it’s also tampering with the things that make us human.”

In the series, Gilpin plays Sister Simone, who, while attempting to enact her revenge on the bot known as Mrs. Davis, gets caught up in ancient religious conspiracies (she is, essentially, searching for a riff on the Holy Grail). The actress has thought a lot about the consequences of a more technologically advanced world and where her own values line up against her character’s. “I think AI wants to go after things that are easy to monetize and wants us to put blinders on and only go after our individual goals,” she said. “If we take those blinders off, we’d realize, oh, we forgot to fix global warming and to build a democratic society where everyone is living peacefully. [Instead], there’s billionaires on yachts.”

Gilpin was joined by series director and EP Owen Harris to discuss their show as part of a THR Presents panel, powered by Vision Media. Harris, who previously worked on Black Mirror, described Davis — which was created by Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof — as a love child of the pandemic. “We were all feeling particularly lost and were looking for answers about what was going on in the world,” he says. “[Damon and Tara] were talking about, wouldn’t it be great to be able to press a button and have this all-seeing eye show us the way?”

Betty Gilpin attended the FYC event for Mrs. Davis on June 1, 2023 in Los Angeles. Check out 21 HQ images from the red carpet and panel that were added to the photo gallery!

Skull Island is an all-new animated series aiming to take viewers on an unforgettable adventure with a group of explorers. Charlie (Nicolas Cantu), Mike (Darren Barnet), Cap (Benjamin Bratt), and Irene (Betty Gilpin) set out to rescue Annie (Mae Whitman) from the ocean which leads them to eventually discover Skull Island. The explorers take a journey throughout Skull Island filled with bizarre creatures, terrifying monsters, and the one and only Kong.

Skull Island is created, written, and executive produced by Brian Duffield, Jacob Robinson, Brad Graeber, Jen Chambers, and Thomas Tull. Skull Island stars Nicolas Cantu, Darren Barnet, Benjamin Bratt, Betty Gilpin, and Mae Whitman.

Skull Island starts streaming on June 22 exclusively on Netflix.

The phrase “unlike anything else on TV” gets thrown around a lot. But in the case of “Mrs. Davis,” the words apply.

“Mrs. Davis” is unlike anything else on TV — currently or otherwise. It’s the story of Sister Simone (Betty Gilpin), a strawberry jam-making nun who is attempting to bring down a malevolent artificial intelligence known as Mrs. Davis. And how will she force the end of this evil AI? By retrieving the Holy Grail, of course. (Yes, that Holy Grail.)

The fact that a show that lampoons the all-important algorithm is even airing on Peacock, a streaming platform, feels a little bit like, well, a miracle. The show had somewhat inauspicious beginnings. After Damon Lindelof finished work on “Watchmen” (which won 11 Emmys), he felt like maybe he could help “curate” someone else’s vision instead of starting from scratch. He had a stack of scripts, including one called “Mercy House” by “Big Bang Theory” writer Tara Hernandez. The script, according to Lindelof, was “about nuns in this weird post-apocalypse. They were taking care of kids who had dates stamped on the bottom of their feet. And when their dates arrived, the kids died. That should be very sad. But this script was actually kind of funny. And I was like, who the hell is Tara Hernandez?”

As Hernandez and Lindelof started working on the project, Hernandez offhandedly told Lindelof that she wished there was an app that could tell her what to do. “It was like, nuns over here; Siri telling us what to do over here. Is that a TV show? And the next thing we knew we were blowing up horses,” Lindelof said. That’s another thing that no other TV show has that “Mrs. Davis” does: exploding equine.

But who would play the nun crusading against artificial intelligence?

During the pandemic, Lindelof kept in touch with Gilpin, who starred in his controversial 2020 feature “The Hunt.” She would occasionally inquire about what he was noodling around with.

“I asked him what he was working on and told myself, like, I’m just a friend asking another friend what they’re working on. I’m not asking for me. But I totally was asking for me,” Gilpin said. When he told her it was a show called “Mrs. Davis,” Gilpin immediately thought, I need to play Mrs. Davis.

Instead, Gilpin remembered, he told her: “’There’s a wacky, badass nun character. Will you read the script?’ Like, I want to say ‘Yes,’ before I read the script, but I’ll pretend to be cool and aloof and read the script first.”

Gilpin admitted that she would have played a tree in the background if Lindelof and Hernandez had asked. She was shocked to find her character was front and center in the wild universe that was already so vivid in that first script. “It’s so entertaining and well written that you see it in your mind immediately,” Gilpin said. “And even though this show is a braid of 57 genres, I knew exactly what they were talking about and was desperate to be a part of the world that they were creating.”

“Mrs. Davis” does bop around. One week it’s singularly focused on a Hands on a Hard Body competition (with mystical medieval overtones), the next it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson-style family drama, and yet another week it’s a wacky, island-set science fiction show akin to Lindelof’s beloved “Lost.” Did we mention the band of “Fight Club”-quoting, cell phone-snapping Luddite alpha males? Or the stage magic?

If there’s one mystery left lingering after the first season, it’s whether “Mrs. Davis” will return for a second season. Adding to the confusion was Peacock’s decision to move the show from the Drama Series category to Limited Series for Emmy consideration. “We wanted to make sure that we made something that felt like it was complete,” Lindelof said. “That said, if the audience wants to spend more time with these characters, we just have to come up with an idea that’s worthy of making more.”

Gilpin is already on the case. “I bother both Damon and Tara constantly. I am pretty bad at pretending to be aloof,” she said. “I’m like, ‘When are we doing Season 2?’ I would do this job forever.”

Source: The Wrap

[Editor’s Note: The following interview contains light spoilers for the “Mrs. Davis” series finale — Episode 8, “The Final Intercut: So I’m Your Horse.”]