“So, Betty Gilpin. She’s like my favorite actress.”
I was being deliberately annoying with my son’s girlfriend, more or less leading a one-way conversation at Painters, a fun, spacious restaurant in the hamlet of Brookhaven, where the meatloaf sandwich was a knockout and where I touted the appeal of this Fordham theater graduate (class of ’08) to a current Fordham undergrad who not long ago directed a student production of Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter” and later took the stage as Juliet.
Gilpin was an arty city kid. Her parents were actors, and she grew up down by the South Street Seaport. I was asked what she’d been in.
“Most recently? ‘Widow’s Bay’ on Apple TV,” I said, a performance that shows off her comedic chops as a quick-witted bride dragooned into an early-1700s marriage to a grim, haunted founder of a colony that may be New Englandy, but at the same time is not unlike our own watery, history-deep area, with its outsized historical society presence and past mistreatment of witches.
I went on with the credits: “It was a hit on Netflix, did you catch ‘American Primeval’? Set on the frontier. Kind of looked like ‘The Revenant’ with Leonardo DiCaprio.” Gilpin’s character, who has violently escaped an abusive marriage, is making her way with her kid across the wilds, where the bad guys are the Mormons, led by a chilling Brigham Young.
That too was unseen, these kids have better things to do, so I swung for the fences: “But ‘Mrs. Davis’ is the one — pretty damn timely. She plays a nun battling an evil A.I. entity taking over the world.”
From 2023, on NBC’s Peacock streaming service, it may be an odd, quixotic blend of science fiction and comedy, but it’s also essential viewing for today’s American.
All of this, however, was before the latest issue of Fordham magazine landed in my mailbox, with “Is It OK (Not) to Love AI?” as the featured article, and down at the bottom of page 7 is Gilpin, hailed for her “star turn” as Sister Simone in this “cult favorite” and her subsequent emergence as “one of Hollywood’s fiercest voices for actors against automation.”
She calls A.I. a “wish-fulfillment echo chamber” that “knows it’s hard for us to resist that temptation.”
“More and more we’re faced with this choice,” she says. “You could attempt to experience [human] connection [and] . . . find your brain and heart’s fullest potential, or you could hold this screen in your hand and feel like God for a second and not have to do any of the risk involved in the former path.”
I took a picture of the article and sent it to my son, Fordham class of ’27, crowing, “See? She’s smart, too.”