Taylor Spreitler
Taylor Spreitler served her apprenticeship where a lot of American actors still do, on a daytime soap, playing Mia McCormick on Days of Our Lives between 2009 and 2010. Soap work teaches speed above all else: pages a day, almost no rehearsal, emotional peaks on demand. Performers who come out of it are usually very hard to rattle.
She went straight from that into multi-camera comedy, playing Lennox Scanlon on Melissa & Joey across its 2010 to 2015 run and then Kendra Gable on Kevin Can Wait from 2016 to 2018. Lennox is the role to look at. The sardonic teenager is a stock sitcom part that dies on the page unless the actor can land contempt without becoming unlikeable, and Spreitler could hold a flat look for the length of a laugh and still make the next line work.
The film work went somewhere else entirely: horror, and specifically the kind that carries a franchise name. Amityville: The Awakening and Leprechaun Returns are both revivals of long-running properties, and neither is going to be anyone's favourite film. They do ask her for something the sitcoms never did, which is sustained fear, and she is better at it than the material around her deserves.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Where to start with Taylor Spreitler
Melissa & Joey carries most of her screen time, so begin there. Multi-camera comedy is an acquired taste, but Lennox has the most going on of anyone in the house, and the early seasons are where the show is sharpest.
Kevin Can Wait is the other sitcom and the weaker one, worth it mainly to watch her do the same job in a rougher room. Then the horror pair. Leprechaun Returns is the more fun of the two, a straight-faced sequel to something silly, and it knows exactly what it is. Amityville: The Awakening is grimmer and more serious about itself, and your mileage will vary a great deal. Casual, where she turns up as Mia, is single-camera comedy of an entirely different temperature, and it is the best-made thing in the list even though her part in it is small.