4 minute readrundown
Betty Gilpin’s husband, Cosmo Files, is a former actor and assistant director who later moved into nursing and humanitarian work. Gilpin and Pfeil met while filming Northern Kingdom in 2009, married in 2016, and now have two daughters. Gilpin speaks warmly about Pfeil in her 2022 book of personal essays, All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns.
Betty Gilpin and Cosmo Files have quietly built a stable partnership while raising two children and working in various industries. While Gilpin, known for her roles in GLOW, Mrs. Davis and, most recently, Death by Lightning, has been in the spotlight, Pfeil has kept a low profile. He previously worked in the entertainment industry, but changed his career to become a nurse and become more involved in humanitarian work. Here’s everything you need to know about files.
Pfeil studied fine and studio art and began his career as an actor and director.
Born in Vermont, File attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, earning a bachelor’s degree in fine and studio art in 2000, according to People magazine. After graduating, he worked both in front of and behind the camera. According to his IMDb, he appeared in the films Company K (2004) and Shotgun Stories (2007), as well as television series such as The Good Wife and Person of Interest. He also served as assistant director on Shotgun Stories and the 2011 film Take Shelter.
He and Gilpin met on set and married in 2016.
Gilpin and Pfeil’s love story began on a movie set. The two met when they played brothers in Dorothy Lyman’s 2009 drama Northern Kingdom. The two married about seven years later in 2016.
Gilpin shared memorable anecdotes from her early days in her 2022 book, All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns. During a holiday visit to her parents’ home (where they don’t wear shoes), Pfeil made homemade slippers using paper shopping bags and blue duct tape.
Gilpin recalled watching the wheels turn before Pfeil made the DIY shoes. “In the middle of a loud discussion with my dad about wiper fluid (overlapping Venn diagrams), he apologized for his date’s hobbit bare feet, forcing him to spend his holidays naked and cold in the house without shoes,” she wrote in an excerpt published in Harper’s Bazaar. “I later realized that we were all wearing old Christmas “house socks” from Wal-Mart, and there was a look in his blue eyes that indicated that he urgently needed to undertake an elaborate and inconvenient project to resolve the social situation. ”
The move reportedly met with the approval of her father, who added: “He patted the untamed cobbler on the back with admiration: ‘This is it! A man! A man with a solution!'” Gilpin added.
Gilpin and Pfeil at the 2019 U.S. Open.
Pfeil moved into nursing and humanitarian work.
After working in the entertainment industry, Pfeil made a major career change. File became a nurse, according to Gilpin’s profile in the New York Times. According to People magazine, he has also become more involved in humanitarian work, working as director of operations for aid organization CAN‑DO (Compassion into Action Network – Direct Outcome Organization) and GiveLove, a nonprofit founded by Patricia Arquette that helped promote ecological sanitation in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake.
Pfeil and Gilpin have two daughters.
Gilpin and Files are the parents of two daughters. Their first daughter, Mary, was born in November 2020, and their second daughter was born in 2024.
In a January 2025 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gilpin recalled taking his family to filming locations while filming the Western miniseries American Primeval, calling it “my grand equalizer.” “I spent the day wearing petticoats and riding horses screaming bloody murder, then coming home and bending over in the candy cane position, taking a bath and going to bed. Being a mom in an Airbnb is much harder than filming on top of a ski mountain in sub-zero temperatures,” she said.
Gilpin writes about how Pfeil complements her.
In her novel, Gilpin wrote about her and Pfeil’s different upbringings. “We both looked like Pilgrims from New England, but our upbringings couldn’t have been more different,” she said. “He was born on a barn floor into a circle of talented visionary lumberjacks and nurses in wolf skins, a family of commercial hippies, the kind of people you want on a desert island with hugs and skills.”
She went on to reveal that their personalities and interests are not similar at all. “He knew every type of tree from its leaves, and loved cooking little-known organs with peppers, which made my eyes rain. He could talk for an hour straight about how to make table legs and the itinerary of a hawk. As for me, when my printer runs out of ink, I fantasize about throwing it away.”
However, she recalled talking to her father, who told her to “consider what you have that you don’t deserve,” prompting her to make eye contact with Pfeil, who was “looking back at me.”
