Betty Gilpin went on to make further appearancesin the “Law & Order” universe, re-appearing as a new character in “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” as well as on “Law & Order” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
In the first few years of her career, Gilpin noted that she did just theatre and “Law & Order” guest appearances, and in a 2019 interview with the New York Times, she spoke about how the limitations of the roles were frustrating for her.
“We studied a lot of theater of the absurd at Fordham and ‘building your inner ocean of weird’ was the thesis statement. Then graduating and auditioning for things like ‘Gossip Girl,’ where the No. 1 priority is muffling your ocean of weird and curling your hair, I didn’t work for a while because I was bad at both the muffling and the curling,” Gilpin said. When she did book a role, the responses were not encouraging either. “Sometimes when I was playing a lawyer, I’d created all this identity for this person and done all this homework about what rage they were suppressing. And the first Twitter comment was ‘Nice [expletive],'” she explained.
However, it was on “Nurse Jackie” where Gilpin met Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, who were both writers on the show.Gilpin joined the show in its fifth season, playing Dr. Carrie Roman, and she credited Flahive and Mensch for seeing in her the kind of character she enjoyed playing. Gilpin said Flahive and Mensch, who went on to co-create both “GLOW”and “Roar,” ultimately saved her career by giving her a chance to play the kinds of characters she wanted to.