Alison Brie stars alongside a diverse cast in the new Netflix series GLOW, set in the heyday of the female wrestling world in the late 1980s.
Inspired by the real-life ’80s wrestling league of the same name (which stood for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), the Netflix show has some hefty creative power behind it. Orange Is The New Black’s Jenji Kohan serves as executive producer, while prolific writers Liz Flahive (Homeland and Nurse Jackie) and Carly Mensch (Weeds) came on board as co-creators.
The series follows Ruth Wilder (Brie), a struggling actress in Los Angeles who throws herself into the ring with 12 other Hollywood misfits in a last-ditch effort to catch her big break in Tinseltown.
With a diverse cast made up of different, complex female characters joining forces, the show is already being hailed as a feminist breakthrough on television.
Brie, who is perhaps best known to audiences thanks to her roles on comedy series Community and the award-winning AMC drama Mad Men, says she had to fight hard to get the role.
“I was told kind of early on that people weren’t sure if I was quite right for the part,” she told Metro.
“You audition for certain things and you’re like, ‘Oh this would be a cool job, but I don’t know if I’m quite right for this part.’ And there are other things that I read and it’s immediately like, ‘This is my role!’ [GLOW was] one of those.”
Working on GLOW also triggered a shift in the way she saw herself and her body, she told Stylist.
“Being on the show was super empowering, we all really learned to embrace ourselves because we were using our bodies as a tool,” she told the magazine.
“I was like, ‘My body has value, because I’m a wrestler, I’m powerful, it’s not about what I look like, it’s about how I feel and what I can do.'”
GLOW premieres on Netflix June 23.
