Thanks in large part to the Netflix series GLOW showing off not only her dramatic prowess but also her physical abilities, actor Betty Gilpin is often discussed among fandoms when a new superhero casting opportunity arises, and while she would personally love to get involved in such a massive adventure, the public notoriety is the biggest deterrent from pursuing such endeavors. Even in her latest film, The Tomorrow War, her role requires her to lean into the dramatic elements while her co-stars get fully involved in adventures that require them to save humanity from an alien invasion. The Tomorrow War lands on Amazon Prime Video on July 2nd.
Videos by ComicBook.com
“I do really like that action movies and comic book movies, the genre, it deals with high stakes,” Gilpin shared with ComicBook.com. “I became an actor and studied theater because I want to deal in high stakes and I think that in a lot of modern, more mumblecore-y things, there’s kind of a war on stakes and oftentimes I’ll show and be like, ‘Should I be sobbing? Should I be screaming? Should I be falling down on a banana peel?’ ‘No, you should be whispering and not doing any of that.’ So I think that when things are … there’s a cape or a mask or an alien present, for some reason, it says, ‘Okay, you can have high stakes for this.’ Vulnerability and big choices are allowed.”
She continued, “While I think I’m probably too neurotic and terrified for a big Comic-Con situation or being stopped in an Arby’s by a sobbing superfan, I just think I’ll be disappointing in those arenas. If I could do it without having to have lotion campaigns and not be able to go to the bodega hungover, if there’s a way to do that, I would love to do it, otherwise, I’ll just do Arsenic and Old Lace in the Berkshires and play the stern, lesbian hospital ward administrator on The CW and quietly just expire.”
In The Tomorrow War, the world is stunned when a group of time travelers arrive from the year 2051 to deliver an urgent message: 30 years in the future mankind is losing a global war against a deadly alien species. The only hope for survival is for soldiers and civilians from the present to be transported to the future and join the fight. Among those recruited is high school teacher and family man Dan Forester (Chris Pratt). Determined to save the world for his young daughter, Dan teams up with a brilliant scientist (Yvonne Strahovski) and his estranged father (J.K. Simmons) in a desperate quest to rewrite the fate of the planet.
Gilpin went on to share her love for the sci-fi series Altered Carbon and the ways in which she personally connected with the ambitious concept.
“There’s this Netflix series Altered Carbon, I read the book and saw the series and it’s incredible and it’s a lot of how I think about acting, in that you are this person in this sleeve and inhabit different sleeves or ‘bodies’ and it’s kind of like the metaphor I have in my head when I approach a character and I think to see it realized in such a sci-fi-y way was so cool to me,” the actor expressed. “And the book is so good. I think that, weirdly, even prepping for this part, really, my stuff is not sci-fi-y at all but the thinking I do and the writing that I do is kind of sci-fi-esque in terms of inhabiting a different person and what’s going on in their brain. If only to distract me from thinking about ‘does the way I’m lit accentuate the years of hard living?’”
The Tomorrow War lands on Amazon Prime Video on July 2nd.
Would you like to see Gilpin take on a major franchise? Let us know in the comments below!
