Samantha Sloyan, the actress who refuses to let Margaret White be a monster

Samantha Sloyan

Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 4, 1979 Los Angeles County, California, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Hush, The Life of Chuck, Tape 407
Awards	Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle · LA Weekly Theater

Samantha Sloyan keeps being handed the woman who is sure. Sure of God, and sure of everyone else’s sins. In Midnight Mass she was Bev Keane, the parishioner audiences loved to despise. In Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, now streaming on Prime Video, she is Margaret White, the mother that two earlier films turned into a figure of pure dread. Her argument, built scene by scene, is that certainty is what fear looks like from the inside, and that a monster played that way stops being comfortable to hate.

She describes the character without decoration. “She loves Carrie, but she doesn’t understand Carrie,” she told Entertainment Weekly, adding that Margaret’s reaction to fear “is to really go to war with the world.” Flanagan, who has now cast her seven times, went further at Beyond Fest, calling the performance the best work he had ever seen from her. For an actress who spent the better part of two decades in guest spots and supporting turns, that sentence carries weight.

Sloyan grew up inside the profession. She was born in Los Angeles County on January 4, 1979, the daughter of actors James Sloyan and Deirdre Lenihan; her brother Dan also acts, and her uncle is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Patrick Sloyan. Her screen career began with a small part as a florist in the independent feature My Life with Morrissey in 2003, followed by short films, among them Plus One, which she produced and starred in.

The stage gave her the first serious recognition. Her performance in Buzzworks’ production of Munched earned her both the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle and LA Weekly awards, and she originated a role in the world premiere of Jon Robin Baitz’s Vicuña at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. Television, meanwhile, offered the working actor’s circuit of one-episode parts in NCIS, Castle and Parks and Recreation. On Scandal she recurred as the White House staffer Jeannine Locke across the show’s first three seasons.

Then came Dr. Penelope Blake on Grey’s Anatomy, the surgeon on duty in “How to Save a Life,” the episode in which Derek Shepherd dies. It was a thankless assignment in a series whose fans treat the lead couple as family, and the twelfth season brought her back, giving much of its 250th episode, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” to Penelope.

The partnership with Flanagan started small. In Hush, his 2016 home-invasion thriller, she plays Sarah, the neighbor whose death sets the night in motion. The Haunting of Hill House cast her as Leigh Crain, wife of the eldest Crain brother. Midnight Mass, in 2021, changed the scale. Flanagan has explained that the series was first conceived with its priest as the villain, and that Bev Keane grew into the central antagonist, a pious islander who takes up his cause once he falters. Sloyan located the horror in a crack rather than in the zealotry itself: “nothing terrifies her more than the fact that she may have been wrong,” she told The A.V. Club.

The roles that followed tested different edges of the same instinct. In The Midnight Club she was Shasta, the herbalist living beside a hospice for dying teenagers, with ties to a cult. In The Fall of the House of Usher she played Tamerlane Usher, a daughter stuck in the shadow of the men in her family, a woman of whom Sloyan has said, “She’s so lost and she’s so desperate.” She also has a part in The Life of Chuck, Flanagan’s adaptation of a Stephen King novella.

The risk in being the actress a director trusts with zealots is that the zealots start to resemble one another. At least one review of Carrie reads her Margaret as a variation on Bev Keane, and the echo is real: both are devout women who see the world as a battlefield and their faith as armor. The softening of Margaret is also the series’ most disputed choice. Stephen King wrote her as terror, Piper Laurie earned an Oscar nomination playing her that way for Brian De Palma, and critics have been divided over the show’s departures from the novel. Flanagan has said he “went into this determined not to hate Margaret White”; whether that sympathy deepens the story or drains its menace is the argument the series invites.

Her work outside the Flanagan company is the strongest answer to the typecasting charge. In the first season of The Pitt she played Lily Bradley, the mother of a college student left brain-dead by fentanyl-laced study pills, who must decide with her husband to end life support. She appeared in seven episodes, and viewers singled out how unforced the grief felt.

Carrie itself is her largest showcase so far. The eight-episode series, released in full on October 7, 2026, stars Summer H. Howell as Carrie White and Sloyan as her mother, alongside Siena Agudong, Amber Midthunder and Matthew Lillard; King serves as executive producer. Margaret has been played on screen by Piper Laurie and, in 2013, by Julianne Moore. Sloyan’s version is the first to get eight hours to explain herself.

The next appointment is again with Flanagan. The Exorcist: Martyrs, which he wrote and directed for Universal with Scarlett Johansson in the lead, reaches theaters on March 12, 2027. Sloyan says she has “a very tiny footprint” in it, and that what she glimpsed on set was “the scariest thing that I’ve seen him do.” After Margaret White, a small role in a frightening film may be exactly the counterweight her career needs.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Mike Flanagan, Carrie, Grey's Anatomy, Midnight Mass, Samantha Sloyan, The Fall of the House of Usher

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