Rachel Boston
Rachel Boston is an actor, born 1982.
Network drama got her first, and it got her young. Boston spent the years from 2002 to 2005 on NBC's American Dreams as Beth Mason, the kind of steady period-piece job that teaches an actor to hit a mark and stay likeable, and she followed it with two quick sitcoms, Crumbs and The Loop, that came and went.
The next stretch is the more interesting one. She took small parts in studio romantic comedies, a bridesmaid in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, an Alison in (500) Days of Summer, while doing the real work in low-budget independents: The Pill, and It's a Disaster, an end-of-the-world comedy that never leaves one brunch table. Television kept casting her as the warm one. She was Abigail Chaffee on In Plain Sight from 2011 to 2012, and then a lead on Witches of East End as Ingrid Beauchamp across its 2013 to 2014 run.
Since then she has become a fixture of the Christmas-movie industry, which is a real career and not a punchline: Ice Sculpture Christmas, A Rose for Christmas, Check Inn to Christmas, A Biltmore Christmas. The films are formula and she is very good at the specific thing they need, which is playing sincerity without pushing on it. Actors who can do that without curdling into smugness are rarer than the genre's reputation suggests.
Movies (10)
TV (8)
Where to start with Rachel Boston
Start with It's a Disaster. It is the credit with teeth, an ensemble comedy whose joke depends on everybody staying polite for far too long, and she holds her end of it without begging for the laugh. From there, Witches of East End is the fullest showcase, two years of her carrying half a fantasy soap with a straight face.
If you arrived from the romantic comedies, be warned that (500) Days of Summer and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past are sightings rather than performances. American Dreams is where the apprenticeship happened, and it still holds up as a series in its own right.
For the Christmas films, choose by setting rather than plot, because the plots are the same: A Biltmore Christmas has the best house, Ice Sculpture Christmas the silliest premise. Watching one is watching all of them, which is more or less the point of them.