Betty Gilpin Describes State of Broadway as a ‘Game for Movie Stars’ to ‘Get Butts in Seats’

Even Betty Gilpin didn’t think she was a big enough star to be on Broadway. 

In a New Yorker interview published Sunday, October 11, the Emmy Award winner recalled making her Broadway debut in 2025 as the first performer to take on the role of Mary Todd Lincoln following creator Cole Escola in Oh, Mary!. 

“Oh, Mary! felt like a crazy culmination of everything that I never thought was possible,” the Glow star explained. “I had never done Broadway because I just straight up was-slash-am not famous enough.” 

Gilpin described the current state of Broadway — “understandably,” she said — as a “game for movie stars,” adding that “they have to support a commercial run and get butts in seats.” 

“While I have done my time as, say, ‘wife in a miniseries about the invention of the windshield wiper’ on a streaming network no one has heard of, my star meter does not always support, like, doing Hamlet at the Lunt-Fontanne,” Gilpin said. 

Prior to Gilpin’s eight-week limited engagement in Oh, Mary! at the beginning of last year, the actress starred as Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan in the Netflix comedy series Glow, earning three Emmy Award nominations for her performance. She also played Dr. Carrie Roman in Nurse Jackie and starred in the Peacock science-fiction series Mrs. Davis. 

Still, Gilpin admitted, “I was shocked when that call came in [for Oh, Mary!]. But it was this amazing fluke.” 

“I have a private Instagram for mostly friends,” she explained. “It’s me sitting in various trailers throughout my career, waiting to be called to set in costume, making videos as a regional-theatre actress losing her mind at half-hour — a character who’s sort of half Valerie Cherish, half Blanche DuBois.” 

“Cole saw those, I guess, and was, like, this person might be just demented enough to attempt to replace me as Mary Todd,” she said. “I got the call when I was being a wife in a miniseries in Budapest. I was playing Lucretia Garfield [in Death by Lightning], and I was in a bustle and a corset on an Oval Office eighteen-hundreds set, and my agent said, ‘They want you in for Oh, Mary!, would you be interested?’” 

Of the experience making her Broadway debut in Escola’s award-winning work, “It was a wild eight weeks,” she said. “We rehearsed for, like, four days, in a room — it felt like rehearsing Gladiator in a Starbucks.” 

“Going out onstage that first time was the most afraid I’ve ever been,” she confessed.