Betty Gilpin plays women who are furious, funny and better at something than they would like to be, and lets you see all three at once. In GLOW that made her the best thing in a good series.
Fi1m perspective
Debbie Eagan arrives in GLOW as the woman whose husband has slept with her best friend, and for an episode or two that is all the part asks of her. Then she gets into the ring. Gilpin plays Debbie as furious, bored, brilliant on camera and appalled that the thing she is best at turns out to be a joke in Lycra, and she keeps all four going at once. Her matches with Alison Brie's Ruth are the only place the two women can talk, and the show knows it. We went in expecting the wronged wife to be the dull corner of the series and found we were watching Gilpin whenever she was on, because she never lets the anger cancel the pleasure.
She had been working for a decade before anyone built anything around her. Guest television parts from 2006, off-Broadway theatre, a recurring run as Dr Carrie Roman in Nurse Jackie (2013–2015): steady employment, much of it the kind of small, decorative part offered to a tall blonde woman before anyone has looked closely. GLOW (2017–2019) was the first time a show was written to what she could do, and Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch deserve credit for making Debbie unlikeable and right at the same time. Since then she has moved between films and series, The Hunt (2020), The Tomorrow War (2021), Mrs. Davis (2023) and American Primeval (2025) among them, and made her Broadway debut in 2025.
She has described herself as "Cyrano driving the Barbie bus", and it is a fair account of the trick. The face gets her the audition; what she does with the part is what nobody expected. The physical work is real. Debbie's Liberty Belle is an athlete's performance, not a costume, and the later action and satirical parts, The Hunt especially, ask for the same commitment of the body. We have not reviewed The Hunt and will not pretend to know whether it gives her anything to do with the fury once the running stops.
The risk with a performer this good at rage is that she keeps being asked for it and nothing else. Her leads so far have been on television and her film parts mostly supporting, and on our own viewing we cannot yet say whether anyone has written her a second Debbie. Until they do, start with GLOW, give it the half-season it needs to find its feet, and watch for the moment Debbie realises she is good at this and does not know whether to be pleased.
Biography
Betty Gilpin is an American actress. She portrayed Debbie Eagan in the Netflix series GLOW (2017–2019), for which she received three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
She studied at Fordham University and made her off-Broadway debut in 2008 in Good Boys and True. Her father, Jack Gilpin, is also an actor. Gilpin has appeared in films including True Story (2015), Isn't It Romantic (2019), The Hunt (2020) and The Tomorrow War (2021). She is credited as Kris in the 2026 film The Social Reckoning.
