Spencer's best work is anger with nowhere to go. As Amantha Holden in Rectify she fought for her brother's release and then could not forgive anyone, him included, for not being grateful enough, and she made it funny. The network work since has asked less.
Fi1m perspective
Amantha Holden got her brother off death row and then had to live with him. That is the whole of Abigail Spencer's part in Rectify (2013), and she plays it as a woman who spent herself on a cause and finds the winning harder than the fight. She is angry with everyone, including Daniel, for not being as grateful as she needs them to be, and the anger is precise rather than loud. She also gets most of the jokes, in a series about a man sent home from death row, and she delivers them the way people do when the alternative is screaming. We laughed at her more than at anyone else on that show, and it took us a while to notice that the laughs were coming from the character who was in the most pain.
It took her a long time to get a part that good. She started at seventeen on the daytime soap All My Children (1999–2001) as Rebecca Tyree, which was her training as well as her first job, and spent the following years in the middle of the cast list: the lead in the short-lived Angela's Eyes (2006), then guest parts. Six episodes of Mad Men in 2009, as Suzanne Farrell, changed the offers, and she has said as much. Then Ray McKinnon wrote Amantha, and for four years she had a character with a past, a grievance and a sense of humour, opposite Aden Young at his most remarkable.
What she does well is specific and a little unfashionable. She is from Gulf Breeze, Florida, and she is repeatedly cast in Southern parts because she gets the regional detail right without leaning on it. She prepares in small physical ways; on Rectify the nail polish changed with the story. "I knew the way she walked. I knew what her nails looked like. I knew how my hair was supposed to be." That kind of work shows on screen as ease rather than fuss, provided the writing meets it halfway. McKinnon's did.
The work since has been steadier and thinner. She led Timeless (2016–2018) as Lucy Preston, a network science fiction series that critics generally felt had a good actor and not enough for her to do; we have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, but the complaint is a familiar one for performers who are best when the material is hard. There were recurring parts as Dana Scott in Suits (2011–2019) and in Grey's Anatomy (2017–2022), and film roles in support. She now produces through Innerlight Films, which may be the sensible response to a business that has given her one part fully worthy of her.
Start with Rectify. It is slow, it is the best thing she has done, and it is the best argument anyone has yet made for what she can do when somebody bothers to write it down.
Biography
Abigail Spencer is an American actress. She began her career with a role as Rebecca Tyree on the ABC soap opera All My Children (1999–2001) and later starred in the Lifetime series Angela's Eyes (2006).
Spencer is known for recurring roles in series including Mad Men, Hawthorne, Suits and Grey's Anatomy. She played Amantha Holden in the SundanceTV drama Rectify (2013–2016), for which she received a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination, and Lucy Preston in the NBC series Timeless (2016–2018). Her film credits include Cowboys & Aliens (2011), This Means War (2012), Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) and This Is Where I Leave You (2014).
