So that's what happens when you wear a corset—an honest to goodness, 18th-century-era corset.
"Good lord, if I have to wear one more corset," Abigail Spencer, star of NBC's new drama Timeless, laughed during a recent interview with E! News—looking almost visibly relieved that she wasn't in a corset at that very moment.
"We really are exploring the 1800s and the 1700s on our show—girl, it is crazy," the actress said. "It's beautiful, it creates this beautiful aesthetic and increases your posture."
But, Spencer added conspiratorially, "You burp all the time. This is not class at all! It looks classy, but you're just," she gasped for emphasis, "so gassy from the corset."
We knew it!
"It squeezes all of your insides and I cannot wait till we rip it off at the end of the day," Spencer concluded. "Yeah, no, I'm really glad that that made its way out—even though Spanx are our version of the corset."
Otherwise, however, Spencer—veteran of small-screen fare such as Mad Men, Suits and True Detective as well as films including Oz the Great and Powerful and This Is Where I Leave You—loves playing dress-up for her role as Lucy Preston, historian turned accidental action hero when Homeland Security comes calling for her expertise on a super-secret mission that involves zipping back and forth through history's most tumultuous times.
A collector of vintage clothes and a big Katharine Hepburn fan, Spencer says her favorite period to visit on the show has been the 1940s—not a fashion era she had known much about previously.
"Something about that era for me [made her feel], 'Yeah, this is the one," she shared.
But overall, Spencer told us, "the best day of production is the first day of a new episode because nobody knows what I'm going to look like—and I don't even know what I'm going to look like."
In the meantime, Lucy hasn't reached action star status just yet. "In the first episode, she falls out of the time machine," Spencer explained. "She's just not adept. She almost runs into a plane!... I think keeping some of those elements so she'll have somewhere to go, that's really important to me."
Taking our E!Q in 42, Spencer also filled us in on her own personal time-travel preferences and share as many of her favorite things as she could in 42 seconds.
We were still in 2016 when it was all over, but the time just flew by!
Timeless airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on NBC.
(E! News is also a member of the NBCUniversal family.)