How literal dreams and intuition led Abigail Spencer to ‘Mad Men’ and producing ‘The Actor’

Abigail Spencer is a dreamer.

The Timeless and Suits alum — who just wrapped a dramatic guest arc on 9-1-1 — literally dreamed her Critics Choice-nominated Mad Men role into existence.

“I was a new mom and was having these incredibly creative dreams and I woke up and I called my then-manager and I said, ‘Hey, I just had a dream that I’m supposed to be on Mad Men. I think you should call them,'” Spencer tells Entertainment Weekly. “At this point it was going into season 3 and it was the biggest show in town, so they go, ‘We don’t call them, they call us.'”

But the Mad Men casting team had cast Spencer on her first post-All My Children series, Angela’s Eyes, in 2006, so the actress insisted her manager make the call.

“I’m not kidding, 10 minutes later, they call me back: ‘Oh my God, you’re never going to believe it, they told me they literally just said your name for a part coming up and just stay tuned,'” she recalls.

“Staying tuned” turned into weeks, and Spencer thought her dream may have died — then, out of the blue, she got a call to meet with Mad Men mastermind Matt Weiner and a day later she was on set as Sally’s former teacher and Don’s mistress, Suzanne Farrell.

It’s that sort of dreaming that led Spencer to produce The Actor, the surreal new film from director Duke Johnson (Anomalisa) starring André Holland and Gemma Chan. “Duke calls me the spiritual producer, because there isn’t logic involved. This movie has come to be through so much intuition,” she says of their adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s novel Memory.

As The Actor hits theaters, Spencer shares with EW the 10-year journey of bringing the film to life.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You and Duke have a production company, Innerlight Films. How did you even meet?

ABIGAIL SPENCER: Duke and I met on an airplane when I was 21 years old. He was fresh out of NYU, and I was fresh off a soap opera. It was a really great meet-cute. I was like, “Oh, every director needs an actress, and every actress needs a director.” And he really kind of became my film school. We kept in touch over the years and became very deeply connected creatively. And while he was [co-directing the Oscar-nominated stop-motion feature] Anomalisa, I went and produced a bunch of shorts so I could be ready to take on even more.

How did Memory become something you wanted to adapt?

When Duke was in post on Anomalisa in 2015, he asked [his co-director] Charlie Kaufman, “Is there anything that’s good that I should read?” Charlie was reading Memory and handed it to Duke and said, “You should turn this into a movie.” It’s an emotional thriller, not a crime novel, which is very different from the rest of the Westlake catalog. Duke read it that night and called me the next day and said, “Hey, Charlie gave me this book, read it today.” So I did and called him back, “I love it. This is your next movie.” And he goes, “Okay, go get the film rights, producer.”

What did you all love so much about the book?

It’s one man’s journey to find himself. He loses his memory. He wakes up and doesn’t know who he is. He’s in the middle of Ohio in the early 1950s and is told he’s an actor and that he lives in New York, but he doesn’t have any relationship to who he was or New York or anything. So I think it’s how we all put on how we act in our lives. I loved the literal metaphor.

Was getting the rights an easy task?

I tracked down the Westlake estate and was very, very fortunate that I got in touch with Abigail Westlake, who’s Donald Westlake’s widow. I wrote her a letter asking for the film rights and she wrote back and she’s like, “I’ve never met another Abigail!” She was like “yeah, yeah, yeah” about the movie, she was just so moved and we have this personal connection and shared a name, so she let them have it.

What was the development process like?

The first draft of the script was 238 pages long, so that’s too long. But by the summer of 2019, we were ready to take it out to the industry…. We’ve got so many great partners on it: Charlie Kaufman. Ryan Gosling‘s an executive producer on it. When Ryan came on, we redeveloped the script for him for a year and a half. Then he had to go do a little movie called Barbie and we got to have André Holland take over for him.

What made André Holland the right lead for this film?

André’s character is in every frame of this movie, so we had to find an actor that could bring that depth and it not be boring. I met André when I was 18 years old at Florida State University, when he was an undergrad acting student. My best friend from high school went to FSU with him. Being able to call him and say, “Would you be the lead of our movie?” I mean, this whole experience has been a series of unbelievable full-circle moment that came to fruition of seeds planted years and years ago. So it’s very interesting how all this constellation came together.

Why did you feel like Duke had to be the one to make this movie?

Duke is known for stop-motion animation, and we got really excited thinking about how you take all the lighting techniques and stop-motion elements he created and expand them into live-action. One thing you do in stop motion is you use the same puppets for all the characters and just putting a different face on them. I was like, “What if, since he’s lost his memory, all the actors except for André and Gemma Chan are the same?” So we have a troupe of 10 actors playing all the characters he meets while he’s searching for the one thing he can remember, Gemma. We had our first screening with an audience on Monday and it was so fun seeing them catch up to what was going on.

Now that The Actor is out in the world, what’s next for you as a producer?

Duke is such a unique — and dare I say, auteur — filmmaker. I know he’s going to have a long career. He takes a long time to make his movies, so he may not make a lot of movies, but each movie will be so intense. I feel like he’s creating a body of work, and my job as his producer is to support his body of work. The Actor is just his chapter 2, there’s so much more coming.

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The Actor is now in theaters.