GAYLE RANKIN

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Gayle Rankin is not one to play it safe. Whether as Ophelia opposite Oscar Isaac in the Public Theater’s new production of Hamlet or as the professional wrestler Sheila the She Wolf in Netflix’s GLOW, the Scottish actress revels in pushing past her limits. “Playing a nuts character is becoming my fucking MO,” she laughs. “I’m into extreme women.”

Rankin herself is, as she readily offers, no “shrinking violet,” but the audacity of some of her performances comes backed with strong classical training—after all, a woman with “species dysmorphia” who believes she is a wolf might not fit smoothly into the English canon, but Shakespeare’s tragic heroine surely does. Raised in Glasgow, Rankin first came to performing through her mother’s passion for both movies and music. After beginning as a singer, she soon shifted focus to acting, later attending the Dance School of Scotland for high school and, eventually, Juilliard, where she became the first Scottish student to graduate from its acting program. “It was my naïveté and my balls,” she says when asked what it took to get her through the school’s rigorous audition process. “I’m very Scottish in that way. I’ll just be like, ‘I think I just want to do that.’ Not in an egotistical way, but like, ‘If not me, who else?’ I always do believe that and I think it helps me. It’s a part of who I am, which is a pretty raw person.”

That rawness proved an asset soon after graduating, as she quickly picked up parts in Off Broadway plays like Tony Kushner’s The Illusions, an all-female Taming of the Shrew, and Nina Raine’s celebrated Tribes. Then, in 2014, she landed her Broadway début in the Alan Cumming-led revival of Cabaret, which also starred Michelle Williams as the dissolute Sally Bowles. Playing a prostitute, Rankin was nominated for an Astaire Award for her dancing, a fact which bemuses her to this day. “That’s amazing to me,” she laughs. “I was a notoriously bad dancer in high school. I was in the B class and I would cry most classes—I couldn’t even make it across the floor. I can dance, but I’m a very instinctual person, so I don’t do well with technique per se. That was the irony in me being nominated for the Astaire Award, but that’s a point for Rob Marshall’s amazing choreography, which is more actor-driven than anything.”

This summer, Rankin, now twenty-seven, is back on stage again in a four-hour-plus production of Hamlet, one of the season’s toughest tickets thanks to Isaac’s turn as the tormented and tormenting Danish prince. Set in modern dress, the staging is an unconventional interpretation courtesy of Tony-winner Sam Gold, requiring Rankin to sing, binge on takeout, and roll around in actual mud. “I guess it was both conscious and unconscious to try and make it new and fresh,” she says of her Ophelia. “It’s difficult for me not to allow part of myself to come into a character, because I just work from a really personal place if I possibly can. We’re not changing the play and we’re not making her a different person, but I tried to make her strong. She ends up killing herself at the end of the play and some people look at that as weak, but I don’t see it as weak. I think the world has proven to her that love doesn’t exist, and that’s a really difficult thing for anyone to believe. What’s the point in being here if it doesn’t exist?”

Rankin’s morose reading is in keeping with a production that, despite moments of levity—many of them courtesy of Keegan-Michael Key—is one about grief. “The reason we do these plays is to figure things out and the reason they’re still happening is that nobody ever has,” she explains. “We’re trying to narrow in on, What does it mean to die? What does it mean to not live anymore? We’re never going to know how it actually feels, but trying to unpack that and what the grieving process looks like is important for people.”

And Rankin, for all her spiritedness, has not been immune to the play’s darkness. “Should we call my boyfriend?” she jokes when asked how she handles it. “I’m not going to say it’s easy to remain balanced whilst playing Ophelia, or even just being in a play. I have to have an Ophelia day and Gayle day. I believe that if you’re really trying to get inside of someone else’s head, part of them is going to rub off on you. It does make you think about the world differently. It is exhausting to try and remind yourself, ‘Hold on, why do I feel like shit? Is it because of me or is it because of her?’ It’s like there’s this other person that I’m in a relationship with right now, which is weird.”

Rankin went just as deeply into character—albeit for a drastically different role—for GLOW, the new series from Orange Is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan dramatizing a late-Eighties television show about the “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling” headlined by Alison Brie. Her Sheila, never seen without her bird’s nest of a wig, dark eye makeup, and patchwork of furs, truly thinks she is a wolf in a woman’s body, a situation the show treats with a grace that is surprising given the over-the-top personalities the other wrestlers inhabit. “Sheila came to me and I really didn’t know what to do with her,” Rankin admits. “I didn’t know who she was and I decided I would just take her really seriously. As a woman, I can relate to wanting to create a persona. We’re trying to figure out how best to feel safe and good and confident, or just survive, so there’s that aspect of it that I can really sympathize with and understand.”

In another sign of her dedication, Rankin and her boyfriend visited a wolf sanctuary in California’s Lucerne Valley to commune with some lupine friends to prepare for the role. “The one thing I knew was I had to figure out what I loved about that animal,” she recalls. “I had to feel love and respect and figure out what drew me to them. I did figure out a lot about why I would want to live like them and not me.”

With a mostly female cast and creative team, GLOW is not afraid to shy away from the era’s easy sexism. The majority of the women are dressed up in skimpy leotards by Sam, the director of the show-within-a-show, who also treats them with a brusque disregard. For Rankin, that dissonance—that sense of, as she says, “Wait wait wait, he is not going to say that! She can’t wear that!“—is what makes the show more than just a flashy summer comedy. “I think what’s so smart about what they’re doing is they’re really setting us up for a fight,” she says. “It is a struggle to time travel back in time to 1985, but part of it is that we need to expose that and hopefully we’re going to fucking tear it down and watch these women go nuts. What’s important about bringing a bunch of women together to make things is to really turn the heat up high on what we need to say and what we need to explore. We can push forward what we need to say a little harder.”

As if theater and television weren’t enough, Rankin’s also set to break out on film this year, in both Noah Baumbach’s latest, The Meyerowitz Stories, opposite Dustin Hoffman and Adam Sandler and the blockbuster circus musical The Greatest Showman with Hugh Jackman and Zac Efron. It’s fair, then, that her post-Hamlet plans will hopefully include a Mexican vacation. “I want to go somewhere really cheesy and simple,” she laughs, “because my brain needs to take a break.”

But then it will be back to work, and a busy schedule of difficult roles seems to be exactly what Rankin—who is drawn to extremes both in herself and her characters—needs to survive. “I have a big thing for bravery,” she says. “I’ve got a huge fear of dying, so when I try and rationalize it, I get very dark and extreme. It’s a part of who I am, an extroverted introvert. I think that bravery comes with putting yourself out there, and so when I sense that in a character, I’m attracted to it. I want to pull it out because I’m like, ‘Yes! Do it! Do it!’ Because we don’t have a long time.”

Hamlet runs through September 3 at the Public Theater, New York. GLOW is now streaming on Netflix.