Morgan Saylor is an American actress who portrayed the Brodys' eldest daughter Dana Brody on Homeland.
Biography[]
Morgan Saylor was born on October 26, 1994 in Chicago, Illinois but grew up in Georgia. The young actress played her first role in two episodes of the award-winning series “The Sopranos” in 2006. Other smaller roles followed, including in "K-Ville", until Saylor celebrated her breakthrough in 2011 with her leading role as Dana Brody in "Homeland".
Saylor attended a Montessori school until eighth grade, where she had her first contact with acting. She later performed at community theater and summer camp. When she was in the third grade, her family moved to Atlanta, where Saylor discovered the world stage. She met fellow actors and decided that she wanted to be a successful actress one day.
In her free time, her main activities include school education and climbing. The young actress does the latter with passion. She graduated from school in May 2013 and plans to continue working as an actress, even though she spontaneously signed up to study.
She is most famous for her role as Dana Brody, the sister of Franny and daughter of Nicholas and Jessica.
The actress has taken to the stage as well as the screen, and she maid her theatrical debut alongside Ruby Sparks star Zoe Kazan in When We Were Young and Unafraid.
In 2015, she starred as Kevin Costner's character's daughter in the sports drama McFarland, USA.
She also received critical acclaim for her role of Leah in the 2016 film White Girl, which premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in 2016.
She resides in New York City with her Boardwalk Empire star partner, Ben Rosenfield.
Reviwe[]
Dana Brody On 'Homeland': Morgan Saylor Speaks Out On All The Hate
I think Todd Van Der Werff over at the A.V. Club makes the best case for Dana:
There’s been plenty of debate among my critical brethren about the need for the Brody family to continue being a part of this series, but I’ll come out and say this: There was nothing in this episode as riveting and interesting to me as the travails of Dana Brody, even with the topless selfie you just know will leak to the press in episode seven. I liked season two more than many critics and more than many of you, but the more I’ve thought about it since it ended, the more I’ve realized that what that season was lacking were real, obvious consequences. Carrie and Brody behaved essentially with impunity, and the only consequences they suffered were of the nebulous variety that existed solely within the show’s reality. This was particularly true of the Carrie and Brody romantic relationship, my biggest problem with the season, which went from a strange connection between two damaged people to the truest love ever depicted on television. In a lot of ways, this was a disconnect between the writing, the performances, and the directing, which were all working at odds in the depiction of this relationship, but it particularly felt as it did because the ultimate consequence of the two’s canoodling was that they were separated forever (again) by Brody’s apparent framing for the Langley bombing and Carrie sending him off to Canada to go on the run. Season three almost immediately begins putting the lie to this fiction the two (or maybe just Carrie) built up around themselves, and this is particularly true in the Brody family storyline. Dana doesn’t just suffer because her father’s now the most wanted fugitive in the world; she tries to kill herself in a moment of absolute despair. Homeland gets into trouble when it forgets that it’s not a show about Nicholas Brody, but in the Brody family storyline, it remembers that it’s at its most powerful when it’s a show about how the people in Brody’s orbit perceive him. The ghost of Nick Brody is literally the only thing tying all of the series’ disparate storylines at this point, and that’s an interesting choice, one that takes its time to make itself fully known but one that carries a punch when we see, say, Dana struggling to readjust to a world that’s spinning off its axis or Jess trying to move forward while being subject to journalists hounding her when she picks up her daughter from a mental health facility that she had to beg her mother to pay for.