Caitlin FitzGerald plays women who look sheltered and turn out to be paying attention, and she is best when a series gives her years to let that attention harden into decisions. Masters of Sex did; it remains the work to see her in.
Fi1m perspective
In the first season of Masters of Sex (2013), Bill Masters lets his wife believe that their childlessness is her fault, when he knows it is his. Caitlin FitzGerald plays Libby as a woman who believes him, and it is because she believes him so completely that we were properly angry with him. We said at the time that the series weakened whenever it left the basement for the suburbs, and we stand by that. It never weakened because of her.
That was the part that made her, and it was a long one: four seasons, from 2013 to 2016, in which Libby moves from dependence on her husband to a life of her own. FitzGerald has said herself that by the end Libby is no longer organising her life around a man, and the pleasure of the performance is how slowly she lets that happen. Before it there were small parts from 2008, including It's Complicated (2009), Gossip Girl, two films with Ed Burns and Priss in Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress (2011). After it came leads in Sweetbitter (2018–2019) and UnREAL (2018), recurring parts in Succession (2018–2019), Station Eleven (2021–2022) and Inventing Anna (2022), and Agent Daphne O'Connor in Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020).
What she has is a particular combination: a slight, willowy figure, a girlishness in the voice, and a perceptiveness that suggests she sees more than the character has yet been allowed to say. It suits women who have been kept in the drawing room and are working out how to leave it, and television has cast her that way more than once. The same qualities have counted against her elsewhere. Her Hedda Gabler on stage in 2010 was found short of weight, and we can see why. Hedda is not sheltered, and the perceptiveness that makes Libby interesting is not the same thing as the will that makes Hedda dangerous.
The frustration is that the parts since have mostly been shorter. Simone in Sweetbitter, a self-reliant woman in New York restaurant life, is the closest she has come to being handed the other end of Libby's arc; we have not reviewed it, so we will only say it is the one we would look at next. The rest has been a few episodes at a time in somebody else's series. Start with Masters of Sex. Our review told you the best of it is in the basement; for her, you will have to sit through the suburbs, and she makes that easier than it sounds.
Biography
Caitlin FitzGerald is an American actress and filmmaker. She was born on 25 August 1983 and raised in Camden, Maine. She attended Concord Academy and graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. She also studied Shakespeare at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
FitzGerald is known for her role as Libby Masters in the Showtime series Masters of Sex (2013–2016). She has appeared in films including It’s Complicated (2009), Damsels in Distress (2011) and The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), and in series such as Gossip Girl, Succession (as Tabitha Hayes) and Sweetbitter (as Simone). In 2012 she starred in and co-wrote the independent film Like the Water.
