The Case of the Disappearing Actress: Alison Pill

Here at Pajiba, we have a recurring feature we call “The Case of the Disappearing Actress,” where we mourn the apparently vanished career of some talented woman who was Everywhere for a moment and then seemingly ceased to exist. We’ve done it for actresses who got aged out, burned out, or just quietly went into hiding. We do it with genuine affection and a fair amount of righteous indignation.

Today, we’re doing a version of it for Alison Pill. Except that Alison Pill didn’t go anywhere. She’s been working steadily this entire time. She’s been in things. Good things, even. You just… didn’t watch them.

And that’s on you.

You may remember Pill from her scene-stealing run as Maggie Jordan on The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s deeply flawed ode to his own genius, where she managed to be genuinely compelling despite being handed dialogue that would have made a sour lemon pucker. You may remember her as the terrifying Mary Anne Spier in the Baby-Sitters Club movie or Scott Pilgrim’s drummer-girlfriend Kim Pine.

The point is: you knew her. You liked her. And then, somewhere around 2019 or 2020, you stopped watching the things she was in.

Let’s do a quick audit of your failures.

Did you watch Devs? Actually, yes, you did — or at least you watched enough of it to form a strong opinion at the time. Alex Garland’s FX/Hulu miniseries, where Pill played the curiously cold quantum physicist Katie opposite Nick Offerman’s tech-bro messiah, was the kind of slightly-up-its-own-ass prestige television that you raved about to friends for three weeks and then completely forget ever existed. It was also canceled after one season. You liked it at the time. You have retained nothing.

Star Trek: Picard? You kept saying you were going to watch it. You were genuinely excited about it. You read our review. You added it to your list. You never watched it. Pill was a series regular for two seasons, playing Dr. Agnes Jurati — a role that apparently expanded considerably as the show went on — and you missed all of it because you got busy watching Will Arnett’s LEGO show and never circled back.

How about Hello Tomorrow!? No? She was in an Apple TV+ retrofuturistic series alongside Billy Crudup — Billy Crudup, who you love — set in a gorgeous atomic-age world where people are being sold timeshares on the moon. You didn’t watch it. Don’t worry: almost no one else did either, and it holds the rare distinction of being one of the very few Apple TV+ series canceled after a single season, which requires a special kind of collective indifference given that Apple TV+ has renewed The Morning Show approximately sixteen times.

Eric LaRue? Eric Lawho? That’s Michael Shannon’s directorial debut — a serious, well-reviewed drama about a school shooter’s mother — which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2023, featured Pill alongside Alexander Skarsgård and Judy Greer, and which you have never heard of until this moment despite that cast.

Young Werther? A Goethe-inspired romcom in which Pill plays the object of an aspiring writer’s doomed obsession, which premiered at TIFF in 2024 and has been available for your viewing for months. It has “Alison Pill doing something interesting in an underseen film” written all over it, and yet here you are reading a post about how Alison Pill allegedly disappeared.

Admit it: the last time you actually registered Alison Pill on screen was in Devs, a show you enjoyed, discussed with mild intensity for approximately one week, and have since completely wiped from your memory. She has not disappeared. The disappearance is yours.

The good news — for Pill, and arguably for your viewing habits — is that she’s been cast in Rabbit, Rabbit, a Netflix hostage thriller series starring Adam Driver and Regina Hall that has approximately a 100% chance of being watched by you. The show, created by Peter Craig (The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick) and directed by Philip Barantini — the guy behind Boiling Point — centers on an escaped convict (Driver) who takes hostages at a truck stop and ends up in a psychological standoff with a veteran FBI negotiator (Hall). It’s currently in production in New Jersey.

Pill joins a murderers’ row of reliable character actors, including Brian D’Arcy James, Annie Golden, and Patch Darragh, and Reed Birney, who is a close friend of my step-mother-in-law’s brother (no, seriously).

So: Alison Pill is fine. She never needed your concern. She’s been quietly, consistently excellent in things you didn’t watch, and now she’s about to be in something you probably will.