Betty Gilpin talked to real nuns for help with her Mrs. Davis character
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Mrs. Davis is certainly an eccentric show. Betty Gilpin, who stars as a nun named Simone who becomes entangled both in a battle with the titular artificial intelligence and a quest for the Holy Grail, describes the colorful genre mash-up from co-creators Damon Lindelof (Watchmen) and Tara Hernandez (Young Sheldon) as if "someone put a pixie stick, dipped in Coca Cola, inside someone's imagination."
But in spite (or maybe, because) of the colorful eccentricities, the show also feels grounded in modern life. Even though ChatGPT doesn't have Mrs. Davis' capabilities quite yet, it has pushed "AI" to the front of people's minds. That resonance wouldn't work if the human characters in Mrs. Davis didn't feel real. Gilpin, who admits that she is "not a person of faith," had to put in work to make Simone feel believable as a believer.
"I think that we're used to seeing nuns portrayed either as sort of one-dimensional, stoic, climb-every-mountain nuns, or horror movie nuns," Gilpin tells EW. "I think I really had to work hard to dispel my own notions of what a nun is like and what their lives are like, and really make her a full-fledged person."
Sophie Kohler/PEACOCK Betty Gilpin as the nun Simone in 'Mrs. Davis.'
After all, nuns don't just linger in movies like The Conjuring 2 or reissues of The Sound of Music. There are still women today who take the vows and live in convents — much to the surprise of other Mrs. Davis characters, who constantly ask Simone if her habit and wimple is some kind of Halloween costume. In order to make Simone's responses authentic, Gilpin sought out some of those real-life nuns.
"I talked to nuns for research for this show and they were all multi-dimensional, feminist, badass, incredibly smart women who were very active in their communities," Gilpin says. "They were also three very different women. So I felt I owed it to them to make her a very specific person — but it was all there in the writing anyway."
Gilpin knows a thing or two about writing in her own right — after years of penning occasional guest essays in prominent publications like the New York Times, she published her first book, All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns, last year.
Chris Diamantopoulos, who plays anti-AI resistance leader JQ on Mrs. Davis, has nothing but praise for Gilpin's many talents — even if JQ and Simone often butt heads due to their diametrically opposed personalities. In an interview with EW, Diamantopoulos compares Gilpin's lead performance in Mrs. Davis to an unholy fusion of Meryl Streep, Harrison Ford, and Daffy Duck.
"She's so unbelievably fearless," Diamantopoulos tells EW. "Whether she's going for vulnerability or insanity, in the moment she is always serving the material and the character. It's like Betty Gilpin has stepped outside of the building and she's fully Simone. So for me as an actor, working with her and watching her, I would just stand back like, 'God damn, that's the way you do it when you're number one on the call sheet.'"
That speaks to Gilpin's experience on past shows, like GLOW, more than her conversations with the nuns. She also says she didn't ask the nuns for their thoughts on artificial intelligence. They just had one question for her in return.
"They were like, 'How can we watch the show?'" Gilpin recalled. "I was like, 'Well, it's on Peacock. Do you guys have Peacock?' They were like, 'Oh, we don't have streaming.' Okay, well, that's fine."
Anyone who doesn't live in a convent and does have access to Peacock can stream the first four episodes of Mrs. Davis now, with subsequent installments arriving weekly through May 18.
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