It wasn’t the sex scenes Emmy-nominated actress Betty Gilpin was most nervous about shooting in the book-to-screen adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women. Instead, Gilpin had to embrace another form of inhibition shedding: dancing like nobody's watching. “To think about being in a group of friends of friends and standing up, being like, ‘I'm going to dance by myself at this P.F. Chang’s when no one else is dancing, I mean, I feel my throat closing thinking about that scenario,” Gilpin tells Marie Claire.
Nearly three years have passed since Gilpin filmed this scene as her character Lina Parish, but the flicker of dread is visible while she describes this moment to me over Zoom in early September. “To train for that moment alone was like Kill Bill-level mental training for me, but it was also a great acting exercise because [Lina’s] incapable of subtext. It's all on the surface,” Gilpin says. The scene in the second episode isn’t foreplay per se but speaks to the central crux of Three Women: women harnessing their own liberations; to feel seen and less alone—even if the only person who eventually joins Lina on the makeshift dance floor is a sympathetic waiter.
