Kia Stevens, who plays Tamee/Welfare Queen in the series, is the only female cast member who is actually a professional wrestler. Stevens has been a champion all over the world wrestling under the name Awesome Kong (sometimes Amazing Kong). She also briefly wrestled in WWE as Kharma.
The wrestler who trained the actresses for this series, Chavo Guerrero Jr. is the nephew of Armando Guerrero, a.k.a. Mando, the trainer for the wrestlers in the original 1980s series.
Ursula Hayden is the owner of GLOW - Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. She was on the original GLOW in the 1980s as Babe, the Farmer's Daughter and she bought the company in 2001. She is also a story consultant on GLOW Netflix.
The idea for the series came when Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, who at the time were looking to make a new female-centric show, came across the 2012 documentary GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Before this, neither woman had heard of the GLOW wrestling promotion, and they became intrigued by the premise of producing a fictionalised version of it. Both women found the story line intriguing as a way of exploring the aftermath of the 1970s Woman's Liberation Movement.
During an interview on a wrestling podcast, Alison Brie joked that GLOW's female nudity may have been included to gain male viewership for the female-driven series. "Betty Gilpin has sort of talked about that, the nudity, and our bodies, that exploitation has been like the trojan horse of the show where we're smuggling in real, intimate stories of these women's lives under the guise of, like, tits and ass and women wrestling!" Brie admitted that she thought the show's nudity was done well because it was realistic. "I will say I like how they used nudity on this show and on Orange Is The New Black. It's women again taking ownership of that nudity and not doing it in a way? You sort of catch people in nude moments or changing their clothes or whatever and it's not super, 'I look sexual and perfect in this moment of being naked!' It's more sort of, realistic nudity, which I like. A person's changing a shirt and you see her tits."