Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.
Join today
Already a member?
Log in
Mckenna Grace has revealed she turns down acting roles that require nudity in light of the fact that she wants to play a Disney princess in the future.
The Gifted star, 20, opened up on the one kind of role she stays away from, telling Cosmopolitan: “At this point, I definitely don’t do nudity or very hypersexual things. I respect anybody who can, but it’s terrifying to me. I don’t know if that’ll ever change.”
However, she wasn’t looking to keep her career completely sanitised, adding: “It’s not like I only do wholesome things – my character literally gets gutted by Ghostface in Scream – but my dream is to try and be a Disney princess someday.”
Grace has been working as an actor since she was five, when she landed her first television commercial.
She made her television debut in Disney XD sitcom Crash & Bernstein in 2012, before taking on a recurring role as Faith Newman in the long-running American soap opera The Young and the Restless.
Her breakthrough came in 2017, when she starred opposite Chris Evans in Gifted, playing a child prodigy, and portrayed a young Tonya Harding in I, Tonya. She went on to appear in Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, as well as playing Phoebe Spengler in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and its sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
Her performance as Esther Keyes in The Handmaid’s Tale earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2021.
On the contradictions of being a child actor, she told Cosmopolitan: “As a kid on set, you’re expected to act like an adult until you’re on camera. Then you’re a kid until everybody is mad at you because you’re acting like a kid.”
Watch Apple TV free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial.
Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
She continued: “Now it’s cool to be an adult and be able to give my opinion and have a bit more ownership over characters. I’ve really enjoyed sitting down with producers and pitching all my ideas.”
Grace will be seen next in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, where she plays the snarky and sharp Maysilee Donner, opposite Joseph Zada, who plays a younger version of Haymitch Abernathy.
Directed by Francis Lawrence, the film is set 24 years before the events of the original Hunger Games films and centres on the 50th Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell, in which each district must send twice the usual number of tributes into the arena.
The ensemble cast also features Elle Fanning as Effie Trinket, Glenn Close as Drusilla Sickle, Ralph Fiennes as President Snow, Kieran Culkin as Caesar Flickerman, and Maya Hawke as Wiress.
Grace, who has previously talked about being a fan of the franchise, said she kept a journal to keep track of fan expectations for her character. “For Maysilee, I’m like, ‘Okay, they want to see the braid,’ so I’d pull Francis aside, like, ‘Look, man, she needs this braid in her hair; she needs this pin.’ He’s like, ‘Sure, Mckenna.’”
Early reviews of Sunrise on the Reaping have hailed the film as “near-perfect” and “easily the best” film in the franchise.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is due in cinemas on November 20.