What Has Tamara Taylor Been Up To Since Bones Ended?
Throughout its 12-season primetime run, Fox's procedural drama "Bones" regularly ranked among the goriest shows on television. It just as regularly ranked among the silliest, too, with creator Hart Hanson and company taking obvious pleasure in making "Bones" a series one couldn't easily peg down to one central genre. And fans of the long-running series would likely be happy to tell you that seriocomic dichotomy is exactly what elevated "Bones" above many of its network contemporaries.
It was, naturally, the cast of "Bones" who were tasked with towing that razor-thin line between comedy and drama from week to week. And few could argue that stars David Boreanaz, Emily Deschanel, and the rest of the "Bones" cast didn't tow that line with utmost professionalism throughout. So, too, did Tamara Taylor, though it's all too easy to forget the long-time "Bones" star was not an original member of the series' cast. In fact, her character didn't turn up to run things at the Jeffersonian until the show's second season.
Both Taylor and her character were instant hits with "Bones" fans, and she remained a major player on the show all the way through its 2017 series finale. Here's what Tamara Taylor has been up to since "Bones" ended.
Taylor played an ambitious social climber on Season 1 of Altered Carbon
Given that Tamara Taylor's acting career charts all the way back to the late 1980s, it should hardly come as a shock that she kept at it once "Bones" made its exit from the primetime landscape. Indeed, Taylor wasted little time booking her follow-up gig, claiming a supporting role in the first season of Netflix's hyper-stylized sci-fi series "Altered Carbon." Based on Richard Morgan's beloved cyberpunk book series of the same name, "Altered Carbon" unfolds in a distant future where human consciousness can be stored in "stacks," and uploaded into new bodies which are referred to as "sleeves."
That history-altering tech has made it possible for the super-rich (called "Meths") to not only stay super-rich, but essentially live forever. And the prospect of immortality understandably inspired some not born into the "Meth" way of life to reach for it, anyway. That was just the case with Taylor's "ground-born" Oumou Prescott, who spends the bulk of her "Altered Carbon" narrative doing the bidding of the nefarious Bancroft family in hopes they make her a "Meth." That doesn't happen, and Prescott's time among the super elite eventually comes to an unfortunate end. Still, Taylor brought a certain smarmy, vindictive grace to the role that ensured Oumou made a lasting impressing in the series' Season 1 landscape.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. found Taylor portraying a major Marvel baddie
Tamara Taylor was far from finished with dystopian future narratives after "Altered Carbon" ended. Indeed, she promptly found herself masterminding an effort to rid Earth of humanity in one of her follow-up gigs, and she did so as one of the most calculating beings to ever grace a Marvel television project. That project was Marvel's wildly underrated ABC series "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." which picked up with the titular agency in the immediate wake of the MCU's first "Avengers" movie.
"Agents of "S.H.I.E.L.D." eventually aired seven thrilling seasons of comics-inspired drama before ending its small screen run. Taylor played the last of the series' big bads, as her seemingly all-knowing Chronicom Sybil didn't turn up until the time-hopping seventh season. Yes, Sybil and her Chronicom faction were the reason Coulson (Clark Gregg) and the S.H.I.E.L.D. team find themselves darting all over the timeline in the final season, because the Chronicom master plan is to travel back in time to erase S.H.I.E.L.D. from the timeline altogether, thus paving the way for her advanced species of A.I. beings to lay claim to earth.
Thankfully, Coulson and the gang find a way to keep that from happening. But given the icy manner in which Sybil went about her business, that was often in doubt. And you can thank Taylor's all-but emotionless work for making Sybil one of the series' most memorable villains.
Taylor recently made major waves on Law & Order: Organized Crime
Once "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." ended, Tamara Taylor went from playing one deadly lady right into another. Though her "Law & Order: Organized Crime" character Angela Wheatley was a far more human sort of femme fatale, Taylor brought a similar veil of cool, calculating evil to the role. In doing so, her Angela very nearly proved the undoing of everybody's favorite "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" alum Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) in the spin-off series' first season.
As it happened, Taylor turned up in the pilot episode of "Organized Crime" playing the seemingly kind Columbia University professor ex-wife of New York crime boss Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott). If you're familiar with "Organized Crime," you know Stabler believed Richard Wheatley was responsible for the murder of his wife Kathy (Isabel Gillies). You likely also know Angela's kindly facade was just that, as the incredibly vindictive character proves to have had more of a hand in her ex-husband's dastardly dealings than anyone might've anticipated.
That includes Stabler himself, who is initially taken in by Angela's welcoming veneer, only to find out she is a legit wolf in sheep's clothing, and even played a direct hand in his wife's death. And that head-spinning revelation was indeed made all the more shocking because Taylor had imbued the character with such warmth and humanity prior to the reveal.