Samantha Sloyan is Mike Flanagan's zealot of choice: the woman in the pew who has read the book and means to use it on you. In Midnight Mass she is quietly frightening. Elsewhere in his ensembles she has had less to do.
Fi1m perspective
Bev Keane does not raise her voice. In Midnight Mass (2021) she quotes scripture at you in a tone that suggests you have already lost, and the trick of Samantha Sloyan's performance is that she never once winks. Most actors playing a parish bully let us know, somewhere behind the eyes, that they find her ridiculous. Sloyan plays a woman who is right and is being patient with you about it. We found her harder to sit with than anything else on that island, because we have all met her, and because for long stretches she seemed to be winning the argument.
She took the long road to that room. There were small film parts and shorts from 2003, guest spots on NCIS, Castle and Parks and Recreation, then recurring work on Scandal (2012–2014) and Grey's Anatomy (2015–2016) as Dr Penelope Blake. The turn came with Hush (2016), her first film for Mike Flanagan, and she has barely left his company since: The Haunting of Hill House (2018) as Leigh Crain, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club (2022) and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), seven projects together in all. Flanagan writes long speeches, more than seven hours can comfortably carry, and Sloyan, who came up through stage work at the Geffen Playhouse, is one of the few in his troupe who can deliver them so that they sound like something a person decided to say rather than something a writer needed said.
The pattern is plain: conviction, control, a protectiveness that shades into suspicion. What keeps it from being a party trick is that she plays the conviction from the inside, so the rigid characters are never one thing. The limit is also plain. In Usher she is Tamerlane, one of the heirs in a pharmaceutical dynasty being killed off an episode at a time, and in a series that shouts where Poe whispered she did not register with us; our review did not find room to mention her. She is at her best when the material is quiet enough for her stillness to count, and Flanagan does not always give her that. Nor, so far, has anyone else. Her reputation sits almost entirely inside his ensembles, and the wider audience has had little chance to find her.
What comes next is either the confirmation or the escape. She has recurring work on The Pitt (2025), and then the lead in Carrie (2026), a Flanagan miniseries, as Margaret White, the mother. Of the part she has said, "She loves Carrie, but she doesn't understand Carrie." That is Bev Keane's sentence too, and Sloyan has been rehearsing it for a decade in smaller rooms. We would also, one day, like to see what she does for a director who does not give her a speech.
Biography
Samantha Sloyan is an American actress. She was born on 4 January 1979 in Los Angeles County, California, and is the daughter of actors James Sloyan and Deirdre Lenihan.
Sloyan has appeared in recurring roles on Grey's Anatomy (as Dr Penelope Blake) and Scandal. She has collaborated frequently with filmmaker Mike Flanagan, appearing in Hush (2016), The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Midnight Mass (2021, as Bev Keane), The Midnight Club (2022) and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023, as Tamerlane Usher). She is also credited in the upcoming series Carrie (2026, as Margaret White). On stage, she has performed at the Geffen Playhouse and received LADCC and LA Weekly awards for her work in Munched.
