What Camille From Bones Has Been Doing Since The Show Ended
Adding new characters and/or replacing well-liked original cast members can be a dicey prospect for new series that's wrapped a wildly successful first season. And yet, Fox's beloved gore-tastic procedural Bones managed both when the series headed into season 2, replacing Jonathan Adams' original boss Daniel Goodman with the fresh-faced vibes of the goodly Dr. Camille Saroyan.
Dr. Saroyan was portrayed by the one and only Tamara Taylor, and while the gifted actor wasn't among the O.G. Bones cast, she'd go on to portray Camille for a whopping 223 episodes between Bones's second season and its series-ending 12th. Along the way, Dr. Saroyan became as vital a member of the crime-solving Jeffersonian team as Brennan (David Boreanaz), Booth (Emily Deschanel), or any Squint in between. She even managed to score a couple of compelling subplots of her own.
Spending more than a decade on a popular network series can obviously work wonders for an actor's professional profile. Though Tamara Taylor had already been making quite a name for herself prior to her work on Bones (she'd appeared in Party of Five, Serenity, Lost, and more), there's little question Bones helped put her in public consciousness more than any prior project.
Taylor has more than capitalized on the exposure, booking a handful of high-profile gigs in the years since Bones left the airwaves. Here's what the actor's been up to in her post-Bones career.
Tamara Taylor pulled some devious strings on season 1 of Altered Carbon
Tamara Taylor understandably took a little bit of downtime after the Bones series finale aired in March of 2017. She didn't take much, though, quickly signing on for a juicy supporting role in what would become her first streaming offering.
That project was none other than Netflix's dazzling sci-fi spectacular Altered Carbon. Set in a far-distant future, Altered Carbon explores the perils of a world in which death has essentially been eliminated by "stack" technology, which allows humans to store their consciousness digitally and upload it into a new human "sleeve" once their own body falls into disrepair.
As one might expect, such tech has led to dramatic class divisions, with the richest of humanity using immortality to build eternal wealth, and everyone else struggling to grab their own little piece of the immortal dream. Tamara Taylor turned up on season 1 of Altered Carbon as Oumou Prescott, an ambitious in-betweener desperately trying to levy her elite law skills into a spot among the immortal upper class.
Those efforts backfired spectacularly when Prescott was betrayed by her own employers and forever shunned by the Bay City upper crust, a fact that led her to switch sides and give Joel Kinnaman's Takeshi Kovacs the ammo he needed to crack his case and bring a couple of those elitists down. En route, Taylor delivers a scene-stealing performance fueled as much by a vampiric sense of icy resolve as it is by fatalistic pride and a world-weary humanity.
Tamara Taylor almost destroyed humanity on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Speaking of icy resolve, Taylor's uncanny ability to dwell in that emotionally vitriolic realm was well on display when she leveled up to face off against the MCU's mightiest heroes.
Okay, the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. aren't exactly the MCU's mightiest. and depending on who you talk to (and on what day of the week), they might not even be part of the MCU at all. But for seven full seasons on ABC, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was easily the mightiest (and most consistently entertaining) of Marvel's network television ventures, with its heroes essentially saving the world from utter doom with more regularity than Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America combined.
Tamara Taylor joined Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. about halfway through the series' time-hopping final season, and did so as one of the biggest bads it had ever seen. Her name was Sybil, and she was the seemingly omniscient Sentient Chronicom leader who — with the help of the despicable Nathaniel Malick (Thomas E. Sullivan) — very nearly used her knowledge of timelines and probabilities to engineer the Chronicom's overthrow of Earth, and thus the end of humanity.
That didn't happen, of course, because Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his motley crew of freedom fighters managed to outwit their part-robot counterparts with a healthy dose of good, old-fashioned humanity. Even in defeat, however, Taylor still managed to make the over-confident Sybil not only a fascinating adversary for Coulson and the gang, but a big MCU bad worthy of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s final small screen adventure.
Tamara Taylor helped uncover some dangerous family secrets on October Faction
After failing to bring down her human adversaries on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Tamara Taylor faced off against a very different sort of foe in her followup project. That project was Netflix's ghost-busting family drama October Faction, and indeed found Taylor throwing down with supernatural beings of all shapes and sizes.
Adapted from the comic book series of the same name, October Faction hit Netflix in the early days of 2020 and found Taylor portraying Deloris Allen, the semi-retired matriarch of a monster-hunting family. As the series opens, Deloris and her hubby Fred (J.C. MacKenzie) are on the verge of leaving their days of supernatural melees behind, and retiring to Fred's childhood home. Retirement takes a back seat, however, when their twins Geoff (Gabriel Darku) and Viv (Aurora Burghart) begin to display magical abilities and inadvertently waken a vengeful witch from a centuries-long slumber.
Over the course of October Faction's 11 episodes, matters only get trickier for the Allens as they struggle to balance their monster-hunting jobs with their new, decidedly small-town life. As their lives spiral wildly out of control, Taylor and the entire cast find ample room to showcase their dramatic prowess, comedic timing, and ass-kicking abilities. That they do so while battling some genuinely grotesque creatures is just a bonus.
Unfortunately, not many people are aware of how good Taylor and the rest of the October Faction cast are, because not many people actually watched it. So bad were the numbers that Netflix cancelled the series just weeks after its debut. Still, for those in search of a cleverly executed, vividly realized supernatural drama with charm and wit to burn, October Faction fits the bill.