Among the releases of the 2024 TV schedule this fall is the STARZ’s miniseries Three Women. Based on the 2019 nonfiction book of the same name by Lisa Taddeo, the drama serves as a deep dive into the complicated facets of female sexuality through true stories of multiple women from across the United States. CinemaBlend spoke to one of the show’s main stars, Betty Gilpin, about the person she portrays, and the source material was pivotal to her.
Betty Gilpin Shares Massive Takeaway From The Three Women Book
Much like Shailene Woodley’s character of Gia in the Three Women series, author Lisa Taddeo travelled across the U.S. in hopes of finding the right stories to tell about women and their sexuality. Among the women she found was a suburban wife and mother living in Indiana who dealt with a very unsatisfying marriage. After speaking with the woman (who’s name is Lina in the novel and series), her story has been immortalized in Three Women. And it’s one that had her fighting for her own pleasure after her high school crush gets back into her life.
Along with CinemaBlend’s conversation with Shailene Woodley about how playing her role brought about memories of her time living on the road, Betty Gilpin spoke to me about how Lisa Taddeo’s The New York Times bestselling novel assisted her in playing her latest character. In her words:
I think about the way she describes wanting to be kissed and needing to be kissed, and what a priority that was for Lina. You know, I think that so much of Lina is motherhood and trauma have made her a thousand years old, but she’s also frozen at 16 – wanting to be The Princess Bride and wanting to be somebody’s fairy princess and to be kissed, and just the need, the deep surging, pulsing, real bald need and want of just her mouth on someone else’s, and that she’s not even getting that from her husband. I thought about that all the time, that this is somebody who’s living the wrong life and we’re meeting her at the point where she’s saying, enough is enough. I am going to reverse the course of my life, and get what I want.
The first episode certainly makes a point of communicating Lina’s feelings in a visual way – especially in one sequence when Lina stops in her tracks while grocery shopping at a scene playing on TVs of a romantic moment in The Princess Bride. Throughout playing Lina in the series, Gilpin really grasped on to the deep want that is communicated through the novel.
Why Three Women’s Real Lina Will ‘Remain Anonymous’
Although Lina is based on a real person, during our interview, Betty Gilpin shared that it was decided that she would not get in contact with the actual person Three Women is based on, even though she now has a series based on her true story. As Gilpin continued:
She is anonymous and obviously her name is not Lina and she will remain anonymous. And, I tried to be really respectful of that when I talked with Lisa about her and asked her questions about her. I think that it’s interesting to me that even though we don’t use her real name, and, you know, I’m not playing Abraham Lincoln, so I’m not like blinking like she blinked and wanting to limp how she limped or whatever, but I do want to do justice and honor and service to this soul. This person who was silenced and sidelined and deserved to be the lead in her own story. And, I think this is a version of that happening, even though, you know, her name is different.
Gilpin had a lot of information to do justice to Lina between the novel and Lisa Taddeo as a resource, but the real Lina is out there living her life without the world knowing she is the basis of a STARZ series. Gilpin, who recently led the Mrs. Davis cast after GLOW’s shocking cancellation, feels incredibly real as Lina, and you’ll definitely want to follow her story as Three Women unfolds week by week.
The first episode of Three Women is streaming now on the STARZ app. You can look forward to more episodes weekly on Fridays and check out what other upcoming book adaptations are on the way.