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WOMEN WE LOVE: Mckenna Grace
Written by Cole Hediger. Published: August 15 2024
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Mckenna Grace has been acting for over a decade even though she only just turned 18! She fell in love with the art after a gift from her grandmother: a DVD set of old Shirley Temple movies. The actress immediately started acting, landing local roles in her home state of Texas -- a few commercials here and there -- before one day getting a call from an agency in L.A.
Once she flew out, she never looked back.
And once Mckenna Grace started, she hit the ground running. After scoring the first two roles she auditioned for, Grace became a popular face in many early-2010s series. She was Jasmine Bernstein in Disney XD’s "Crash & Bernstein'...
This role is just one in her repertoire of hit series; others
include "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation", "K.C. Undercover", "The
Vampire Diaries", and "Dog With a Blog". Grace then scored the role
of Faith Newman on the popular long-running soap opera "The Young
and the Restless". Before too long, Grace was breaking away from
the series regular title.
She turned to film. Grace starred as Mary, a genius child, in
the 2017 Chris Evans movie Gifted. This
role which led her to nomination after nomination and a couple of
award wins, the biggest being her nomination for Best Young
Actor/Actress from the Critics Choice Awards.
In that same year, Grace worked her way into I,
Tonya where she stood among award-winning and acclaimed
actors and actresses like Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, and Sebastian
Stan. After these roles, Mckenna was suddenly everywhere.
As she grew on screen, her talent only grew with her. She shined in
her roles as Young Theo in 2018's "The Haunting of Hill House", and
she proved her ability to cross genres as Judy Warren in the 2019 The Conjuring prequel Annabelle Comes
Home.
Mckenna was cast in franchise films too! Soon the Marvel
Universe came knocking to have her play young Carol Danvers in Captain Marvel. More recently, she has taken a role in the Ghostbusters sequel/reboot films as Phoebe. Her quirky,
genius character has appeared in both the films so far: Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen
Empire.
It was around the release of the first Ghostbusters film that Mckenna made her music career known. She started singing
at the age of 4, with her first original song coming out when she
was only 11 years old. She didn’t release her second song until
2018, a single titled “Lost In You”. As her acting career has
kicked off, her singing career and abilities have grown alongside
it. Her song “Haunted House” plays over the end credits in Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
This inclusion of her song was not initially intended when it
was created. As Grace explains in a conversation with Sbjct Journal, “The song
ended up in the credits by complete fate, it wasn’t planned! I sent
the song to our director Jason Reitman to see if
he would direct the video and instead he was like, 'Kenny, I love
this song, can I see what it’s like in the end credits?' I was
obviously like, 'UM YES THAT SOUNDS AMAZING TO ME YES PLEASE,' So
insane how it worked out.”
Around the time of the press tour for the Ghostbusters film, Grace released her song “You Ruined
Nirvana”.
After this drop, Grace also put out a series of songs before
the release of her EP Bittersweet 16. Alongside the EP,
she filmed 6 music videos.
It’s clear that Mckenna Grace has a drive to create that is
far beyond her years, and she has no plans on slowing down either!
She even performed at Lollapalooza for the first time this year!
This comes after her release of 3 songs in 2024 alone, including
“Gentleman” and “Loser!!”.
Grace’s latest single, “Swim Team”, came out just one week ago
and already has nearly 300,000 streams on Spotify.
As for her acting career, Mckenna already has eight upcoming
projects in the works! She has also made it clear that her dream
roles are still ahead of her. The actress has shared her desire to
star in an A24 movie and a rom-com as she makes the transition from
child actor to adult actor. We can't wait to see what she does
next!