NEW YORK  —  Betty Gilpin is not one to complain.

She spent seven months in New Mexico making “American Primeval,” a gory western set in the treacherous Utah Territory in 1857. She filmed in the elements, often at night, with the most volatile co-stars of all: horses. The long shoot was nearing completion when Hollywood went on strike in mid-2023, shutting down “American Primeval” for months. By the time the production resumed in early 2024, Gilpin was six months pregnant with her second child and no longer in a condition to mount a horse. So producers got her a robotic steed.

“It wasn’t the most easy,” is all she’ll grant. But by any reasonable measure, making “American Primeval” was an ordeal. Thankfully, Gilpin had her husband, Cosmo Pfeil, and their daughter, Mary, now 4, with her on location.

“That was my grand equalizer,” she says. “I would spend my days screaming bloody murder in a petticoat on a horse, then get home and hunch over in a candy cane position and do bath and bedtime. Being a mom in an Airbnb is way harder than filming on top of a ski mountain in below zero degrees.”

On a rainy morning in December, Gilpin has just arrived at a cafe in New York City’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. In a beet red sweater adorned with a diagram of the uterus, she has already squeezed in a session at the gym and tended to her daughters, including the youngest, now 7 months old.

Motherhood, she says, “gives you permanent access, whether you want it or not, to a darker, more rooted self.”

That served her well in “American Primeval,” in which she plays Sara Rowell, a woman with a mysterious past trying to start a new life on the frontier with her son, Devin (Preston Mota). With bounty hunters hot on her trail, Sara hires a taciturn stranger named Isaac (Taylor Kitsch) to guide them to safety, which proves elusive in a region where the Army, Native Americans, Mormon militiamen and other settlers are locked in a battle for control.

From writer-creator Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”), director Peter Berg (“Lone Survivor”) and executive producer Eric Newman (“Narcos”), “American Primeval” offers an unrelentingly violent take on the history of westward expansion, one that is likely to stoke controversy, particularly in its portrayal of the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Later this month, Gilpin will make her Broadway debut as Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!,” taking over for Cole Escola in the bawdy hit that reimagines the doleful first lady as a batty aspiring cabaret star. In a strange coincidence of casting, she recently finished shooting the Netflix drama “Death by Lightning,” in which she portrays Lucretia Garfield, the wife of another doomed 19th century president.

But there’s more to Gilpin — much, much more — than bonnets and hoopskirts.

Since her breakthrough role as a soap star-turned-professional wrestler in the dearly departed Netflix series “GLOW,” Gilpin has displayed a remarkable range, not only from role to role but also within individual performances. (Not to be confined to one art form, she also published “All the Women in My Brain and Other Concerns,” a collection of essays, in 2022.) She moves among genres and time periods with ease and she gravitates to layered roles that showcase her versatility: In the inventive sci-fi comedy “Mrs. Davis,” she plays a time-traveling nun fighting a sentient form of artificial intelligence. In the recent “Three Women,” based on Lisa Taddeo’s book of the same name, she portrays Lina, a neglected Indiana housewife struggling with chronic pain and unmet desire.

This has resulted in a level of notoriety for Gilpin that is captured by an interaction she had earlier at the gym. “I could tell a woman was looking at me like she thought we went to high school together — just squinting at me, trying to place me in her yearbook. Then she realized, ‘Oh, I recognize that person from an ensemble miniseries.’”

It’s a comfortable place to be, she says. “I always roll my eyes when I read interviews with actors who talk about how happy they are with their level of nonfame. So you’re doing this public interview?”

Gilpin is quick-witted and highly quotable, with a gift for conjuring evocative imagery on the fly, all of which makes for a lively interview. But she’s also savvy and self-aware enough to anticipate how anything she says might be taken out of context in a media environment where, as she puts it, “We’re all scrolling our phones seeing the most horrifying things, and then our algorithms are feeding us little bits of candy to distract us from the horror.”

“Too many times I’ve done an interview where I say something with my eyes crossed, in a weird demented joke accent, and it’s the headline, sounding totally sincere,” she says. “I can’t control where in one’s toilet scrolling one is finding my interview about neuroses and vulnerability, right?”

The actor is savvy and self-aware enough to anticipate how anything she says might be taken out of context: “We’re all scrolling our phones seeing the most horrifying things, and then our algorithms are feeding us little bits of candy to distract us from the horror.”

(Victoria Will / For The Times)

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Acting was “always sort of destined,” says Gilpin, whose parents, Jack Gilpin and Ann McDonough, though not household names, have worked steadily in film, TV and theater for decades. (Her dad plays Church the Butler on HBO’s “The Gilded Age.”)

Raised in New York and Connecticut, she attended Fordham University, where she studied acting with a Jesuit priest, Father George Drance, who encouraged her to use visual metaphors. “It just took me out of my own head, and made it a magic process, rather than a math equation: ‘Is this right or wrong?’” she says. “Thinking about it in an abstract way helps me shimmy my feathers for the coins.”

She then spent roughly a decade working off-Broadway and cycling through small roles in indie movies and TV procedurals. (Perhaps you saw her as a teacher who had sex with her student in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”?)

A guest stint on “Nurse Jackie,” where she befriended writers Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, led to “GLOW.” Her performance in the nostalgic ’80s dramedy was notable for its intense physicality — she body-slammed like a pro — and the way Gilpin’s character Debbie Eagan channeled her personal anguish into her wrestling persona, an all-American bombshell known as Liberty Belle.

The part earned Gilpin three Emmy nominations and a legion of new fans, including comedian Matt Rogers.

“I just couldn’t ignore the fact that it was one of the best performances I have probably seen, ever — just the sheer versatility of it,” says Rogers, who co-hosts the podcast “Las Culturistas” with Bowen Yang. “As an audience member, whether you’re reading the book she wrote or watching her onscreen, you are well fed.” Gilpin has become a frequent guest on the show, where she and Rogers have bonded over their shared “theater kid” sensibility and the complications of being creative people in a commercial industry.

“When you become viable in an industry way, but you have to reconcile that with the fact that you have this artist’s spirit that wants to roll around on the ground and do theater games,” Rogers says. Gilpin, now a friend, “happens to be trapped in the body of this ingenue leading lady, but she is a real pelvic-floor-of-doom theater person,” he adds. “She feels it in her guts.”

Production on Season 4 of “GLOW” was underway when the onset of COVID-19 shut it down in March 2020; Netflix abruptly canceled the show later that year. “Three Women,” a rare premium drama exploring sexuality from a female perspective, was sold by Showtime during a reorganization at Paramount Global and premiered on Starz in September.

Gilpin as Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan in “Glow.” (Erica Parise/Netflix)

Gilpin as Lina in Starz’s “Three Women.” (JOJO WHILDEN/JoJo Whilden/SHOWTIME)

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Gilpin probably has the right to gripe about how industry turmoil affected these projects but, again, that’s not her style. “I feel very proud and confused at my luck in the business. I’m certainly not shaking my fist about any weird disappointments or corporations making decisions that have nothing to do with me,” she says. “Maybe it comes from starting in the theater, where all that existed was the moment you were making something.”

While some roles can feel fleeting or elusive, with Lina, the unhappy housewife who embarks on a passionate affair with her high school boyfriend in “Three Women,” there was “an eerie clarity” the whole time, Gilpin says. “It’s probably the most connected I’ve ever been to a character.” It helped to have Taddeo’s book at the ready, because of how “she focuses on the moments that we don’t tell each other about — the things we’d edit out of our journals, if we knew they were going to be read,” Gilpin says. “We think those things are ours alone … when actually those moments in our lives where we are yearning for something forbidden or mourning something inexplicable, those are the shared DNA that connects us.”

Shailene Woodley, who plays author Gia in “Three Women” — a stand-in for Taddeo — was impressed by how Gilpin gave agency to Lina, who could easily have come across as a doormat. “I think a lot of actors would have easily followed the simple road of playing Lina with extreme intimacy and vulnerability. What Betty did was give her an electric force of hope and willpower… Where most actors, including myself, would have turned left, Betty turns right, and she finds colors and layers that other people would miss.”

She brings similarly unexpected colors to Sara in “American Primeval,” whom she likens to “a Brontë character who is suddenly forced to play death-rugby in Hades.”

Gilpin likens Sara in “American Primeval” to “a Brontë character who is suddenly forced to play death-rugby in Hades.”

( Netflix )

“As wild as this series is, I did recognize a lot of the things that Sara struggled with as a mom, especially having my first daughter in 2020. I had a lot of catastrophic thinking and was very afraid all the time,” she says.

Berg, who has directed intense action movies like “Deepwater Horizon” — filmed on an oil rig — says “American Primeval” was “the most brutal thing I’ve ever done.” When he found out that Gilpin would be returning from the strike six months pregnant, he thought they might have to drastically rewrite the remainder of the series. Instead, “She was leading the charge every day, up and down that mountain, pregnant, with a smile on her face,” he says, adding, with only a trace of hyperbole, “Betty Gilpin is a true American legend.”

The director, who often encourages improvisation on set, says Gilpin found ways to bring much-needed humor and sweetness to the grim material.

“She would look at me every once in a while and say, ‘You know, it’s not going to kill any of us to laugh a little bit with this show. It can’t be all scalpings, shootings, bear attacks and drownings. We should be able to find some moments to laugh and to feel love,’” Berg recalls. “She found both of those.”

“I keep waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, ‘What am I doing?’” says Gilpin, who will take over as Mary Todd Lincoln from Cole Escola, creator of “Oh, Mary!”

(Victoria Will / For The Times)

Kitsch recalls how Gilpin improvised a tender scene in which Sara gently teases Isaac for having a discernible heartbeat. “I won’t tell anyone,” she says. He praises Gilpin as an instinctual performer whose meticulous preparation — including working with a dramaturg who creates a syllabus of readings to help her get into a character’s mindset — enables her “to just let go and not worry about a bad take or repercussions. She just swings,” he says. “She was always game on, just super focused on the work and trying to get the best out of the day.”

For now, Gilpin is focused on donning Lincoln’s bratty curls and putting her mark on the role that has made Escola the toast of Broadway. “I keep waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, ‘What am I doing?’” she says. (These bouts of panic are often cut short by her 4-year-old, who’s been getting up twice a night lately.)

In an email, Escola remembers being immediately struck by Gilpin in “GLOW.” “She has that mix of toughness and vulnerability that I typically associate with Old Hollywood broads,” they said. The nonbinary playwright and actor is also a fan of a character that Gilpin occasionally portrays on her private Instagram account, whom she describes as “a delusional, out of touch regional theater actress who is in her dressing room a half hour before curtain.” When Escola began to think about a replacement, Gilpin seemed like an obvious choice: “Betty is a capital-A actress with her own unique palette as an artist. I don’t know how [the character] will change yet but it will. She understands comedy and cares deeply about the heart of this character, that’s all that matters.”

“Oh, Mary!” captures the fact that “we are all overlooked, unique geniuses and delusional mediocre idiots at the same time,” Gilpin says. “I will probably be both in the show.”

Gilpin finds comfort knowing that, coincidentally, both her close friend Cristin Milioti and her father made their Broadway debuts on the stage where she’ll make hers. A few weeks ago, she went to the theater for a fitting, and the sensory experience — the crackle of the speaker backstage, the scrape of the hangers being moved across a costume rack — made her tear up.

“It feels like a return to the reason I’m on this earth, honestly,” she says. “Not to sound too insanely out of touch.”

If you are looking for a good movie to watch during these cold winter days, I suggest The Forge. 

Before providing an explanation for my recommendation I must warn that this review does contain spoilers. Therefore, do not read the rest of this article if you intend to watch the film.

The Forge

A Brief Summary

Under the direction of Alex Kendrick, The Forge is a faith-based movie emphasizing the importance of discipleship. Actors such as Priscilla Shirer,  Cameron Arnett, and Aspen Kennedy bring this theme to life with a passion for God that exudes beyond a typical acting role.

Their passion manifests through the story of Isaiah Wright, a young adult struggling to find direction in life. He focuses on playing video games, hanging out with friends and not handling his responsibilities.

His mother scolds him for his lackadaisical habits but a transformation does not occur until he meets Joshua Moore. Joshua Moore, the owner of Moore Fitness gym, offers Isaiah a job. 

Little does Isaiah know, this opportunity will not only change his financial status but help him draw closer to God. God uses Joshua Moore as a mentor who gives Isaiah professional and personal advice to help him mature.

Over a short period of time, Isaiah decides to stop resisting God and accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior. After hearing the news, Mr. Moore disciples Isaiah and invites him into fellowship with other Christian men. 

This maturation helps Isaiah apologize for past mistakes, forgive his father and become a courageous young professional.

The Forge concludes with Mr. Moore issuing a challenge to his forge (and viewers) to make disciples for Jesus Christ.

Relatable to the African American Community 

Brokenness & Fatherlessness 

Along with a compelling message to go make disciples for Christ, The Forge also highlights themes relatable to the African American Community.

One theme was Isaiah’s brokenness due to the absence of his father. This may seem like a negative depiction of black families because some media platforms associate fatherlessness with African Americans.

However, I see this as a positive since it confronts the realities that many young adults of various ethnic backgrounds face.

Pain Drawing People Closer to God

Another theme Christians in the Black community can relate too is painful situations drawing them closer to God. For Isaiah, pain occurs through fatherlessness and the inability to find direction for his life.

But after surrendering his life to God, Isaiah transforms into a new creation.

For Mr. Moore, tragedy happens through a car accident resulting in his son’s death. Mr. Moore is so distraught, his marriage almost ends. Thankfully, yielding his anger to God helps him become a dynamic mentor for other men.

Ownership & Excellence in Business 

One way Mr. Moore serves as a dynamic mentor is by discipling his employee Joshua. Mr. Moore has the freedom to share his faith with Joshua since he owns Moore Fitness Gym. 

This same freedom appears as Joshua’s mom prays with her employees and friends at Cynthia’s (her hair salon).  

In addition to a gym and hair salon, the film features a black owned coffee shop.

Seeing positive representations of African Americans in business through this film is encouraging for two reasons. 

First, this positive representation shows all Christian’s how we can use employment to glorify God regardless of our job title. Second, this film shows there is a strong sense of work ethic, unity, teamwork and business savvy in black families.

Hopefully, this inspires more Christians to start black owned family businesses that will make a lasting impact in their communities.

The Impact of Discipleship

One way to make a lasting impact in any community is by investing in people. Mr. Moore this by establishing the forge and discipling countless men who then disciple others. 

Through these personal investments, men not only grow spiritually, but in every aspect of their lives. They also gain a health support system that allows them to function in community the way God intends.

Imagine what our churches, families and society will look like if more men accept the responsibility of discipleship. 

3 Things You Might Have Overlooked

The Power of Prayer 

The displays of discipleship prevalent in this film could not be possible without prayer. Isaiah’s mom asks her forge to pray for him on a few occasions.

Prayer is also evident during Isaiah’s conversion experience as well as Mr. and Mrs. Moore’s daily affairs. These examples prove we can not draw closer to God or help others in their relationship with the Lord without prayer.

This is why Paul uses scriptures like 1 Timothy 2:8 to illustrate the importance of prayer.

An Excellent Use of Scripture

Along with illustrating the importance of prayer, The Forge does an excellent job of using scripture in its proper context.  This is seen as Mr. Moore quotes or references the following scriptures to make key points

1. Matthew 28:19.
2. Luke 9:23.
3. Galatians 5:13-14.

This factor stands out to me because I have seen other films use scripture and biblical principles out of context. 

Being contextually accurate with scripture is essential because someone who does not fully understand a scripture may be susceptible to false teachings. God will hold filmmakers who intentionally misuse scripture accountable for making others stumble. 

A Reminder About Sin

Thankfully, instead of making me stumble, The Forge offers a helpful reminder about sin.  Sin is not just acts like using drugs, embezzling money, or committing adultery which are typical in many films.

Instead, The Forge reminds viewers that holding grudges, selfish ambitions, and not consulting God in every decision are also sins. I appreciate this reminder because it’s easy for believers to think they are in right standing with God if they do not commit sins others find unjustifiable.

However, God also takes offense when we act in ways that suggest he is not the Lord of our lives. We must strive to live by Luke 9:23 daily in order to be sincere disciples for Christ.

How do you feel about The Forge? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated!