Margot Bingham
Margot Bingham is an actor.
Bingham sings as well as acts, and her first substantial role used both. Daughter Maitland, the jazz vocalist she played on Boardwalk Empire, needed someone who could actually stand on a stage and hold a period room, and the numbers were not decoration; they were the only leverage the character had in a series where everyone else carried a gun.
What she does well is play composure with something moving underneath it. Sara Jumper in Lawmen: Bass Reeves and Joyce Richards in A Vigilante are both built out of what a woman decides not to say, and the second in particular, a spare and unpleasant film about domestic violence, leaves her very little to hide behind.
The rest is a working actress's range across film and television: Nina Meyer in The Family, Clorinda Bradford in Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, Bree in Barbershop: The Next Cut, Lucy in Then Came You, Evie Garrison on New Amsterdam, a nurse on Watson. She also joined The Walking Dead for its eleventh and final season, which is not among the credits listed here.
Movies (5)
TV (6)
Where to start with Margot Bingham
Nothing else here competes with Boardwalk Empire. Daughter Maitland gets musical numbers and a storyline running against the grain of a very male show, and Bingham is the reason both of them land.
For dramatic range, A Vigilante is the hardest watch and the most interesting, a stripped-down film that asks her to play restraint under sustained pressure. Lawmen: Bass Reeves puts her in a well-made Western with real weight to it. She's Gotta Have It is the loosest and most enjoyable of her television, Barbershop: The Next Cut the mainstream comedy sighting, and The Family and New Amsterdam are the network years if you want to see how she works inside a formula.