THE CHARACTER: DEBBIE EAGAN, GLOW

When we meet Debbie (Betty Gilpin) in the first episode of GLOW, she is the devoted and funny friend of our ostensible heroine, Ruth (Alison Brie)—willing to pick Ruth up after an embarrassing mugging and let her swear in front of her infant. (“Of course, you can curse in front of him, he’s a fucking baby.”) But it doesn’t take long for Debbie to undergo a dramatic offscreen transformation. She learns that Ruth has, in fact, been having an affair with her husband, which leads Debbie to storm into a rehearsal for Ruth’s new TV series in a fit of rage—her five-month-old perched on her hip while she screams “You fucking cunt!”

The beauty of Debbie is that there’s no contradiction in those two things: the newly single mother trying to provide for her son and the enraged, scorned friend, brought by wild circumstance into the wrestling ring opposite the woman who broke her heart. Beautiful and blonde, Debbie—like Ruth—has spent a Hollywood career enduring failed auditions and people who only see her looks; having recently left a role on a soap opera to raise her family, she thought she’d moved past all that for good. But the first season of GLOW tracks Debbie’s realization that she can want more, leaning into her wrestling persona of Liberty Bell—another beauty who deploys a steely, terrifying strength when she needs it most.

“I think the two events of becoming a mother and having Ruth betray her sort of caused Debbie’s life to explode,” Gilpin said. “But I think Debbie lost some things in the life explosion that she wanted to lose anyway.”

HOW SHE CAME TO LIFE

Though GLOW creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch were open to a wide range of people in casting, they had a pretty clear sense of who Debbie was from the beginning. “I think we had a lot of the character figured out on the page,” Mensch said in a phone call. “I think what Betty beautifully brought to it was her rage was so large that only a wrestling ring could contain it.”

Flahive and Mensch knew Gilpin from their work on Nurse Jackie, where Gilpin played the brusque Dr. Carrie Roman for 34 episodes, as well as the New York theater scene. “We asked her to audition knowing that she was the type of person we were thinking of,” Mensch said. “We knew she was someone who was incredibly smart and incredibly weird and an incredibly talented actress who could go Greek and go tiny nuance.”

Gilpin, the daughter of actors, studied theater and spent 10 years primarily on the New York stage; she sums up most of her film and TV work in that period as “I cried and died in every show you could cry and die on in New York.” She considered herself “hyper-realistic” about working in film and television: “I thought, I’ll feed my soul in this play, and then get health insurance from this multicam about computers in space or something.”

She auditioned for Piper on Orange Is the New Black—a series created by GLOW’s executive producer Jenji Kohan—and “a million things that did not go my way.” She fully expected GLOW to be more of the same—particularly in the later stages of the audition process, when she was paired with Alison Brie. Brie had flown to Toronto for the occasion, where Gilpin was in production on American Gods. “It was so my social-anxiety nightmare, that fancy Alison Brie had to fly to Toronto to come read with me,” Gilpin said. “I had never met her; I didn’t know if she was going to be pissed that she had to do that. She literally held her arms open to me the second we met.”