Betty Gilpin

Betty Gilpin, born Elizabeth Gilpin on July 21, 1986, in New York City, is an American actress whose work spans television, film, and stage. She is the daughter of actors Jack Gilpin and Ann McDonough. Her father, also an Episcopal priest, is a first cousin of Drew Gilpin Faust, who served as president of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018. Gilpin grew up in the South Street Seaport neighborhood of Manhattan, in an area she has described as largely a fish market at the time, where her family's home was among the few occupied buildings on the block. She graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in 2004 and from Fordham University in 2008, where she studied under actress Dianne Wiest.

Gilpin launched her career with guest appearances on television series including Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Fringe, Medium, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elementary. Her profile rose with a recurring role as Dr. Carrie Roman on the Showtime comedy-drama Nurse Jackie, a part she held from 2013 through the series' conclusion in 2015. Her breakthrough came with the Netflix comedy-drama GLOW (2017–2019), in which she starred as Debbie "Liberty Belle" Eagan, a character inspired by the 1980s female professional wrestling league Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. The role earned her three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series as well as three Critics' Choice Television Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. In 2022, she appeared as Mo Dean in the Starz political thriller limited series Gaslit, receiving a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Movie/Miniseries for that performance. The following year, she starred as Sister Simone / Elizabeth Abbott in the Peacock science fiction series Mrs. Davis, playing a nun who battles artificial intelligence, and earned a TCA Award nomination for Individual Achievement in Drama.

Gilpin's film credits include Ghost Town (2008), Take Care (2014), True Story (2015), Future '38 (2017), Isn't It Romantic (2019), A Dog's Journey (2019), Stuber (2019), The Grudge (2020), Coffee & Kareem (2020), and the satiric thriller The Hunt (2020), for which she won a Critics' Choice Super Award for Best Actress in an Action Movie. She appeared in the science fiction action film The Tomorrow War in 2021 and had a supporting role in an episode of the Apple TV+ anthology series Roar in 2022. In 2025, she starred in the Netflix Western miniseries American Primeval alongside Taylor Kitsch, portraying a woman navigating the frontier amid conflicts between Mormon militias, Native Americans, and the federal government, and also played Lucretia Garfield in the Netflix historical drama miniseries Death by Lightning.

Prior to her Broadway debut, Gilpin appeared off-Broadway in productions including Heartless, I'm Gonna Pray for You So Hard, and We Live Here. She made her Broadway debut in 2024 in Oh, Mary!, taking over the role of Mary Todd Lincoln from Cole Escola for an eight-week engagement. In September 2022, Gilpin published a collection of twenty essays titled All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns.

In her personal life, Gilpin married actor Cosmo Pfeil in 2016. The couple's first daughter was born in November 2020, and a second daughter was born in May 2024.