Mckenna Grace

Mckenna Grace is an actor, born 2006.

Grace started in a Disney XD sitcom, Crash and Bernstein, and a soap, The Young and the Restless, and by the age of ten she had the lead in Gifted as a mathematically gifted child in a custody fight. That got her a Critics' Choice nomination and set the terms for the decade that followed.

For several years she was the industry's default answer to a specific casting problem: who plays this adult actor as a child. She was young Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, young Carol Danvers in Captain Marvel, young Theodora in The Haunting of Hill House, young Madison in Malignant, young Daphne in Scoob. That job is harder than it looks, because it is not impersonation. It requires matching another performer's rhythm closely enough that an audience accepts the continuity, and Grace is unusually precise at it.

The lead roles run darker than her age would suggest. She played the murderous child in The Bad Seed and its sequel, the Warrens' daughter in Annabelle Comes Home, and Esther Keyes on The Handmaid's Tale, which earned a Primetime Emmy nomination and made her the first child recognised in a guest acting category. Phoebe Spengler in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Frozen Empire is the mainstream franchise seat, a deadpan and unimpressed teenage engineer who is funnier than the adults around her.

She sings and records as well, and in 2022 wrote and executive produced a project she also starred in. The recent slate, from Regretting You to Scream 7, is the test of whether the move to adult leads holds.

TV (18)

Where to start with Mckenna Grace

Gifted is the place to begin. It shows what she could already do at ten, and it is a real performance rather than a precocious one: the child is bright, rude and lonely in ways the script never underlines.

If you know her from the franchise, Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire are the Phoebe Spengler run, and she is the reason the reboot works at all. The Handmaid's Tale is the hardest watch and the best acting, a guest arc that hands her nothing comfortable to play.

For the childhood-of-somebody-else specialism, I, Tonya is the sharpest example and The Haunting of Hill House the most atmospheric. The Bad Seed and the Conjuring spin-off Annabelle Comes Home are the genre programme, more fun than good. A Friend of the Family is the one where she plays real damage straight, and it lands.

Playing the younger version of somebody

A specific and unusually hard job: she has to act like another performer's performance, not like a child. Captain Marvel, I Tonya and The Handmaid's Tale all ask for it, and the Emmy nomination came from the last of them.

The horror run

She has done more horror before twenty than most actors manage in a career, and she is good at the specific thing it needs: playing dread without signalling it. The Haunting of Hill House is the best of them by a distance.

The leads

Gifted is the breakthrough and still the performance to watch, a child prodigy played without a trace of preciousness. Ghostbusters: Afterlife handed her a franchise, and A Friend of the Family is the hardest recent dramatic work.

Genres Mckenna Grace works in

More about Mckenna Grace

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