1534 bluray screencaptures from the movie White Girl (2016) and its dvd extras have been added to the gallery.

What happens when you cross an actress with a math nerd? That’s the question it seems Morgan Saylor—who plays nun-in-training Sister Evelyn in Margaret Betts’s latest film Novitiate and also studies math at the University of Chicago—was born to answer.

But today, she doesn’t want to. “Tell me about you,” she says when we meet. Saylor, who is best known so far for her role as the moody Dana Brody in Homeland (with a young Timothée Chalamet as her ill-fated love interest), has previously said that she sees derivatives in both math and movies, particularly in story arcs and character motivations. Clearly, she’s interested in the personal storytelling side of acting. Though there’s a perceived incongruity between what she’s chosen to study and how she’s chosen to make a living, they’re not so different when you consider that both involve understanding relationships. Saylor says she often has to clarify to people—mostly friends who ask her to work out the check—“I study mathematics, not arithmetic.”

Born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta, Saylor says she has always been into movies: “I just liked stories, really, and pretending.” When she was ten, she signed up for summer camp. “I had an older brother and he was getting too old to pretend with me.” Two years later, she made the budding actress pilgrimage to Los Angeles with her mother. “All of my auditions back then were for Disney shows, which even at age twelve I knew I was terrible at,” she says. “I could never sing.”

What did come out of that trip was a voiceover for The Sopranos, and a recognition that perky, blissfully happy roles were not for her. In person, Saylor conveys a natural, wide-eyed optimism that is very physical—when she nods, the movement echoes throughout her body and not just her head. She carries a lot of energy. But her roles are often tempered by a sense of seriousness, if not downright darkness.

In a previous film, White Girl, she played a teenage girl who falls in with a local drug runner in Ridgewood, Queens. The film is a salacious exposé on the way sex, drugs, and privilege are traded in New York (“I like films that push boundaries,” says Saylor), but even then she represented her character, Leah, with an awareness that sees her grow from a sheltered ingénue eager to explore everything—literally—the city has to offer into someone forced to come to terms with the sober reality of racial politics. In Novitiate, when the postulants trade answers on how they came to the convent, her Sister Evelyn displays deep distress underneath her generally cheerful nature as she reveals her family has “sacrificed” her for the greater good, according to the Catholic belief that one holy person in the family will allow everyone else to go to heaven.

Hi! Morgan attended the screening of ‘Call Me By Your Name’ at the AFI Fest yesterday. 12 HQ pictures have been added to the gallery:

Hi! Morgan Saylor attended a screening of Sony Pictures Classics’ ‘Novitiate’ hosted by The Cinema Society at The Landmark at 57 West on October 26, 2017 in New York City. Her brother Graham (pictured with Morgan) was also in attendance. 37 photos from this event have been added to the gallery

I have added 4 stills from the movie NOVITIATE to the gallery:

Hey! Morgan just wrapped up filming her latest project “Just A Little Bit Longer” few days ago.The movie is directed by Marco La Via & Hanna Ladoul.

Jake (McCaul Lombardi) and Amanda (Morgan Saylor) move to L.A. to start a new life together but things don’t go exactly as planned.

Spanning over a decade from the early 1950s through to the mid-60s, NOVITIATE is about a young girl’s first experience with love. In this case, her first love is God. Raised by a vehemently non-religious, single mother in rural Tennessee, a scholarship to Catholic school soon finds Cathleen drawn into all the mystery and romanticism of a life devoted to the worship and servitude of God. With the dawn of the Vatican II era, radical changes in the Church are threating the course of nuns’ lives. Cathleen finds herself struggling with issues of faith, sexuality, and the changing administration. As she progresses from the postulant to the novitiate stage of training, she finds her faith repeatedly confronted and challenged by the harsh, often inhumane realities of being a servant of God.