Abigail Spencer on ‘Timeless’ and the Importance of Exploring the Past [Exclusive Interview]

One of the most unique television shows on the air right now is NBC’s Timeless — the time travel series that focuses on historical events, which remarkably, had its cancellation reversed in a matter of days thanks to its passionate fans.

Timeless Season 2 hit the ground running and is visiting even more important parts of the past, and in doing so, it’s actually more relevant than ever.

I recently spoke with Timeless star Abigail Spencer, who plays Lucy Preston, about the importance of those stories, the ways her character has changed, and what’s to come for the remainder of Season 2.

First, however, she talked about the emotional whirlwind of hearing her show had been canceled, and then days later, getting very different news.

“I knew it could go one way or the other when I got the call,” Spencer began.

“It was just a weird week. I went through a really big breakup, then I got a call that the show was canceled, and then I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh,’ you know, like what else?! Then it was kind of like a little silver lining, Josh Radnor, my friend, called me and asked me to be in his play, Sacred Valley. So I was going to go to New York and do that, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m unemployed, so I can absolutely go do your play,'” she laughed. “And Rectify had just finished airing.”

“Then the next day, I mean, I was asleep. I was like, in full breakup-and-your-show-got-canceled recovery mode, so I was just out, and I woke up to hundreds of texts and emails saying congratulations,” she remembered. “I mean that was the furthest thing from my mind because, honestly, I’d never seen it happen before.”

“I always go to death and resurrection, to get executed and then resurrected three days later by the same network, and for a network to say, ‘We made a mistake,’ that’s just unheard of. So it was really wild. It was a really beautiful experience. I think one, to know that fans could change the course of history, and it’s so apropos for the show, because that’s literally what the show is about, and I think two, just to get a second chance. And they made some really cool decisions. They moved the show to LA; we got to shoot at Paramount. I’m a single mom, so that was huge for me — to be at home and make the show, and just see what it could be the second time around.”

“I really feel that the show has gotten better. The things that we had control over, as far as making the show, got better in Season 2,” she said. “That’s a tremendous feat for a sophomore show.”

One thing that’s special about Season 2 is that they are only visiting women and people of color.

“Obviously not that men aren’t woven in, but the main story is about a woman or a person of color, of all different cultures. I think that’s really cool because the writers started before the #MeToo, Time’s Up movement and all of those decisions were made before those movements came to pass,” Spencer noted.

“So there’s something going on across the board,” she continued. “I like that the writers are really attuned, and it’s very interesting to be on a show about history when we’re in the middle of a real historical moment in our own country. I do believe that to change the future, we have to explore the past, and we have to see what the people were doing in the early 1920s. What the women were doing during the suffragette movement is not that different than what we’re going through now. We’re further along, but we still have a lot to do.”

The most recent episode, Timeless Season 2 Episode 4, “The Salem Witch Hunt,” feels especially timely.

“I think particularly with the Salem witch trials, it was very interesting because we were shooting that episode as the #MeToo, Time’s Up movement was happening, as those articles were coming out, as things were coming out, and so to be in the middle of studying that and engaging with those women and what they were doing, I was like, ‘What? This is crazy!’ It’s such a mirror to what’s going on now, and it was just really interesting. I’m very grateful for that about the show — it’s built-in reflections, it’s built-in activism, just simply by exploring the past. The show doesn’t have a message to it. You project your message onto the show simply because we’re just exploring historical moments.”

The show has certainly resonated with fans in powerful ways, and Spencer attributes that to a few different factors.

“In the time that the show was off the air, I did some traveling, and so I was in airports. I was traveling across the country and got to engage with a lot of the support that watches the show. I would be in a small town and they would be like, ‘Are you that historian on Timeless? I voted for your show to come back,'” she said. “Sometimes I can’t fathom it, that anybody outside of Hollywood cared enough about it.”

“I noticed this summer a lot of families were stopping me, people with children, and saying, ‘This is the only show we can all watch as a family,'” Spencer continued.

“And older generations get to be like, ‘I remember when that happened,’ or re-explore it, and they get to share it with the younger generation. So I think there’s a real family base. People feel very comfortable watching it with their entire family. I get stopped by 8-year-olds and I get stopped by 80-year-olds.”

“Then there are the people who are the real history buffs. We just did this wonderful forum at the New-York Historical Society in New York, which actually has the only women’s studies focused program and exhibit in the country,” she said.

“And Valerie Paley, who’s the historian there, she was so excited, because to feature a female historian on television is like totally groundbreaking from the historian approach, and to make history cool again. The Smithsonian is doing weekly breakdowns of the show. We did a big forum there last year and they said it’s the most historically accurate show on television ever, and that’s really interesting.”

“What I hope the show does is [to be] a tipping off point, where people say, ‘I’m going to go look that up,’ so it kind of makes people want to do more research. It has for me, too,” she admitted. “It obviously made me want to learn more.”

The third component, in Spencer’s opinion, is all about the characters we’ve come to know and love on Timeless.

“People just really fall in love with the characters, and at the heart of any show, that’s who you have to care about. It could be the biggest spectacle. You could spend the most money on a show ever, which we don’t, but you could! And if you don’t care about the people, you don’t care about what they’re going through, then no one will watch it.”

Spencer does have one wish she believes would help with the success of the show.

“I think my big wish is that the fans had so much power to bring the show back, is that maybe they could even tell NBC when they’d like to watch it. The 10 p.m. slot — it’s so late!” she laughed. “We’re so clearly an 8:00 p.m. show.”

Speaking of characters we’ve become invested in, it’s especially intriguing how much Lucy Preston has changed since we first met her in Season 1. One major example? She goes so far as to kill someone on the Season 2 premiere.

“I have a 9-year-old, and he loves the show. I had to kind of warn him, like, ‘My character is going to kill someone this episode,'” Spencer recalled.

“He had to not watch that part of it, but I was trying to explain it to him. I was like, ‘Well, Lucy was captured by an evil organization that her mother’s a part of, and she basically kind of — she thinks all of her friends are dead, and she decided that it’s her responsibility to stop them. So she is on basically a no-win mission.'”

“That’s kind of what happened, to me, is like Lucy basically was like, ‘Okay, well, I’m going to sacrifice myself to stop everything,'” she continued.

In considering that moment and the other ways we’ve seen Lucy’s character evolve, Spencer teased a little about what’s to come on future episodes.

“It was really hard to shoot that scene and kind of come to terms with that decision, and also, who does that make Lucy now? We won’t really see the truth of that until you get to the end of Season 2.”

And of course, another major change is that Lucy is less focused on actually preserving the past, which comes with its own consequences.

“I think it’s just interesting because Lucy is so different this season. She’s not trying to keep history the same. She’s more using her historical knowledge to stop Rittenhouse, so there’s a little bit of a clearer goal,” Spencer explained.

“Really, she’s becoming a soldier, you know, that’s what we’re watching someone kind of in the process of becoming.”

Spencer said we can expect the show to detail with questions like, “If we did know the future, should we change it? Is there real evil in the world and is it up to us to meddle? I think those are kind of the bigger things that the show is dealing with. If you had the power to stop, to change, would you? And so these characters are kind of living that out,” she explained.

As for what will happen with Lucy and Wyatt now that Jessica is back, Spencer said it’s not necessarily whether or not they end up together that makes their story compelling.

“Eric Kripke has this whole philosophy, and I can’t remember which filmmaker — it might be J.J. Abrams — I don’t know who he got [it from], but he was like, ‘You create these characters that you get super involved with and that you love, and then your job is to torture them… forever!’ Like, oh, my gosh, and so he’s living up to his words, but that’s what makes it interesting.”

“Why I think people are so invested in Lucy and Wyatt, it’s kind of like the Moonlighting — will they / won’t they, hate to love each other / love to hate each other, kind of the back and forth. It’s not about them ending up together. It’s, how did they get there? That’s what’s interesting to watch, so we’re definitely in the middle of that.”

“And I think anybody could relate to Wyatt. All of Season 1, all he wanted was to get his wife back. That was his sole purpose, and then the second that he kind of like lets go of that, she shows up,” Spencer added.

Spencer was also excited to share some of what’s coming up in terms of where the Time Team will be traveling next.

“There’s some really lovely stuff coming. Our first episode after Salem, we actually bring someone from the past to the present, so we kind of change up the model of the show,” Spencer revealed.

“We bring a young JFK to the present, and when he’s 17, way before he became the JFK that we know. And I love that about the show, too. We always meet people before they become the person, before they’re the thing that we know them for, which I think is really cool.”

“After that, we go back to 1930s Texas, meet Robert Johnson, who’s the godfather of rock and roll. Then we go to the suffragette period and meet Alice Paul and Grace Humiston, who was really the first female detective, but she wasn’t allowed to be a detective because she was a woman. But the NYPD used her for all of their missing women cases.”

“Then after that, we go to 1981 Reagan era, which is a really, really fun episode. Get ready for that one. That one is really fun!” she exclaimed. “We think we’re going back to stop Reagan from being shot or something like that, but then there’s a huge kind of curveball that gets thrown at us.”

“Then in episode nine, we go back to the Civil War and meet Harriet Tubman, and then kind of all the stories culminate in episode ten, and we go back to the 1880s Chinatown. That actually has a ton of surprises. It’s going to be a really cool finale. I’m really excited about it.”

Finally, something that Spencer said she spends quite a bit of time thinking about, she talked about the women in history who inspire her the most.

“There was a moment in this 1910 to 1930 in our country where women really came out that we don’t know about,” she noted. “One of the stories I’m really drawn to is Edith Wilson, who was Woodrow Wilson’s wife. He got very sick, and she actually, I mean, they called her the first female president. She was running the country, and we don’t know enough about that.”

“Along with that time period, that’s when the suffragette movement happened, and all of this was born out of really Greenwich Village in New York. There are all these stories about the artists, and the women, and the activism going on in this 1910 to 1930 period that I just want to know more about. The women during that time are fascinating.”

“If you look at what was going on in that 20-year time period — we’re going through it now. We’re having a very mirrored revolution for women right now. But it’s interesting if you go back to that time period and that area of our country, there’s something really connected. So I feel like I want to keep exploring that. That’ll help me understand what they did right, what they did wrong, and see how far we’ve come — and how far we haven’t come at all,” she continued.

“Maybe we got comfortable or maybe [we think], ‘We did it!’ We have not done it. So it’s really cool to see what they were doing then and be like, ‘Okay, basically a hundred years later, what more do we have to do?'”

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Be sure to catch Abigail Spencer as Lucy Preston on Timeless, airing Sundays at 10/9c on NBC.

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