Joelle Carter has one part that counts, Ava Crowder in Justified, and she played it for six years while the programme worked out what it wanted her for. When the writing finally arrived, she was more than equal to it.
Fi1m perspective
Ava Crowder spends a good deal of Justified (2010) being looked at. Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) circle her for seasons at a time, and Graham Yost's series, otherwise as well written as anything of its kind on television, treats her for long stretches as the prize between them rather than a person. Carter cannot fix that from inside the frame. What she can do is make the looking uncomfortable, and she does: Ava is soft-spoken and easy company until, without warning, she is not.
The career before it is thin and the dossier says so. Carter modelled in New York from the age of 19, moved to Los Angeles in the late 1990s and picked up film parts and television guest spots. She is Penny in High Fidelity (2000), one of the women the film is supposedly about, and our review did not single her out, which is fair, because the film hardly does either. There is a supporting part in American Pie 2 (2001). The guest roles of those years have been called stereotyped and small, and nothing we have seen argues otherwise.
Then Ava, and the thing Carter turns out to be good at: a compromised woman who changes over a long arc without the audience quite noticing the joins. She is Georgia-born, which may account for how unforced the Kentucky sounds. She mixes vulnerability, sex and hardness in a way the series' men do not, and she reacts fast, on instinct, so that scenes with Goggins in particular never settle into a pattern. We were impatient on her behalf through the third and fifth seasons, which drift, and Ava with them; then the writers gave her more to do, and we found we had been underrating an actor who had been ready for years. Her own account of the part, given in 2012, was modest and accurate: "Ava’s always discovering new strengths that lie within and she is going to step up."
Since the series ended she has led a horror film, Jessabelle (2014), and taken recurring parts in Scandal (2016) and Chicago Justice (2017). We have not reviewed them and will not judge them here. Anyone who wants to know what she can do should stay with Justified to the end. The part is a long time coming, and she is ready for it when it does.
Biography
Joelle Marie Carter is an American actress. Born on 10 October 1972 in Thomasville, Georgia, she grew up as an army brat and attended high school in Albany, Georgia. She studied at Augusta State University on a full athletic scholarship for swimming and cross-country, and later trained in acting at the William Esper Studio.
Carter began her career in modelling in New York before moving into acting. Her film credits include High Fidelity (2000) as Penny Hardwick, American Pie 2 (2001) as Natalie and Jessabelle (2014) as Kate. On television she is known for her role as Ava Crowder in the FX series Justified (2010–2015), for which she received a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination, as well as appearances in Chicago P.D. and other series.
