GLOW: Alison Brie's 'biggest challenge was keeping a clean bikini area'

There’s so much to love and appreciate about Netflix’s new show, GLOW: the incredible acting! The insanely exciting fictional origin story of the first female wrestling league! The amazing ’80s-era songs and style!

But that last bit proved to be a little trickier than star Alison Brie expected.

“I mean, definitely the biggest challenge of the show was keeping a clean bikini area,” she tells EW with a laugh, referring to the high cut leotards and costumes the women on the show often wear. “I think during that era they must have been shaving, or were they just pushing all their pubic hair in the center? There are some nude scenes on the show and I’d say, well you’ll have to put a merkin on me — that’s a pubic hair wig — ’cause if we see full body…I’m working with something that will look good in our costumes. But I do believe women [at that time] would have had full bushes.””If we do a season two I’m doing laser.”

“If we do a season 2 I’m doing laser,” she adds.

Playing Ruth Wilder, an aspiring yet out-of-work actress who turns to the formation of GLOW (that’s the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) as her personal and professional salvation, had the actress stripping down to just about nothing (you know what we mean if you’ve seen the first episode — “It’s the most naked I’ve ever been and the most naked you can ever be!”) and yet Brie says she’s never been more comfortable. “It’s bodies existing in their natural state on this show,” she says. “I think because we were learning to wrestle and using our bodies in that way, we became like athletes. Normally you’re on a show and you’re so conscious about what you’re eating as an actress because you want to look thin. This was so refreshing. Food was a fuel you needed to in order to do this physical thing. Doing that and then seeing your body as this tool — it was amazing.”

Along with creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, the cast was made up primarily of women — including, among others, Betty Gilpin, Sydelle Noel, and Kia Stevens — and Brie also credits this for the set’s comfortable atmosphere. “I had never realized how much we are under the male gaze every second of our lives. This was a woman’s set, we owned the set. Poor [co-star] Mark Maron realized that immediately! It was so cool to be surrounded by women and being around women who love their bodies made me love mine more.”

GLOW is now streaming on Netflix.