Betty Gilpin as Simone, modern woman of God, with Jake McDorman as her ex-boyfriend Wiley;
MRS. DAVIS IS the kind of show that’s hard to put in a box. Co-created by The Leftovers’ and Lost’s Damon Lindelof and The Big Bang Theory’s Tara Hernandez, the story follows a formidable nun’s battle against Mrs. Davis — a creepy, all-seeing A.I. — with the help of her ex, Wiley (Jake McDorman). But it also tackles the big themes of religion, technology and philosophy. It’s a tricky role for any actor, but Betty Gilpin isn’t one to shy away from a challenge, whether she’s landing dropkicks as an ’80s wrestler in GLOW or outsmarting killers in Lindelof-scripted survivalist horror The Hunt. She tells Empire how she harnessed the habit.
FINDING THE FAITH
In order to dive into a show that handles, in Gilpin’s words, “11 genres that deal with 57 themes”, the actor investigated her character Simone’s faith and what a woman of God looks like today. “I think the nuns that we’re used to seeing on screen are, like, haunted ghost-nuns who eat children’s faces,” she laughs of how they’re usually portrayed. Gilpin’s father is an actor-turned-Episcopalian priest, and via him she connected with some nuns on Zoom. “I had this idea in my head of nuns existing out of time,” she remembers. What she found was that these women were cutting out certain parts of life in order to hyper-connect with the good stuff. “It’s like they were living meditations, and seemed very feminist to me.”