Maggie Grace has most often been cast as the damsel in distress, a role that’s not so true for her character in real life. At 5’ 9”, the blonde beauty could be a young Charlize Theron with her somewhat raspy voice and legs that go for miles. Grace is hardly hapless like her characters either, earning roles in the cult series Lost and the blockbuster Taken flicks alongside Liam Neeson. In person, Grace’s presence was commanding, her long pauses and deliberate answers left me wanting for more. She didn’t want her belly showing like other twenty-something blondes, and she’s more of a bookworm than a socialite. So while her name isn’t in every household yet, it’s probably better for the long run. At twenty-nine, things are just heating up for her career.
Grace spoke in a low tone, with a hint of a British accent, and bounced between excitement and reserve at our photo session at the Dream Hotel in New York City. As you can see in our pictures, she was most alive when the camera was turned on her. She toyed with hats and showed off her glistening legs, alternating between smiles and seduction.
What was strange was how reluctant she was to talk about herself in an interview. While performing my research on Grace, half-naked pictures of her were circulating the internet (taken from a scene in Showtime’s raunchy series Californication) and I had expected something different. Each question she answered was calculated and direct, with long pauses. She deeply elaborated on her characters, but didn’t offer much about her personal life. It’s this mystique paired with traditional Hollywood beauty that makes her sensational, and an unlikely heroine against the sea of the overexposed stars.
She has a pretty standard Hollywood story – coming from a somewhat broken home, a young girl leaves it all behind with bigger dreams. She hails from a small town in Ohio and she’s got relatives in Pittsburgh. The small town girl attitude was left behind a long time ago though, and now she’s all Hollywood. She dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles with her mother at only sixteen, after her parents divorced. Grace and her mother struggled, shuffling apartments and working odd jobs with little stability. When I asked her if the experience left her stronger and pushed her to success, she was silent for a few seconds before replying, “I think I didn’t really have a plan B. I really love what I do, even when its been hard, I’ve been quite committed to it. I’ve always worked just enough. I haven’t had another job. This has always been my job. Just in the nick of time, I’d get a check in the mail from some TV commercial and didn’t have to move back to Ohio.”
Before her days in LA, Grace spoke of a different childhood, before her teen struggles, that was full of light in Worthington, Ohio. She called the small town a “really sheltered, wonderful place to grow up” and she reminisced about hay rides and community theater there. “I fell in love with community theater as a kid, and in adolescence it became my whole life,” she said. “I went to theater festivals as a theater geek when I was thirteen or fourteen. That’s when I realized I could maybe do this for a living, and I went to LA to try my luck.”
It seemed only appropriate that Grace would go back to the stage if given the opportunity. At the time of our interview, she was performing daily on Broadway as Madge, the star of William Inge’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1950’s play, Picnic. “It’s been a dream come true,” she says. “The thirteen-year-old drama nerd inside of me is doing backflips daily.” She was hailed as the unexpected Broadway debutante, but that doesn’t mean she was without insecurities. “It’s a big change, and you’re much more vulnerable in doing stage because you have to go back there eight times a week,” she explained.
Madge is a character that should be somewhat relatable for Grace, the girl who’s probably too pretty for her own good. Both the character Madge and the real life Grace seem to have a tough time getting past typecasts and earning the credibility that they deserve. “She’s a classic ingenue but has some fatal flaws, mainly vanity,” Grace said of her character. “She’s drawn to feel something, and that’s an architecture for change. I think it’s not just this nice girl falling for a bad boy thing. You know everyone kind of views her that way.” She offered some wise advice on Madge’s propensity to fall back on her beauty to get by and said, “It’s sort of a trap because it provides this passive, reinforced positively over and over again.”
In complete opposition to the innocent character that Grace seemed fit to play in her 50’s dresses and perfect hair, our cover girl was also gearing up for her reoccurring role as Faith in the sixth season of Californication. She plays a groupie and muse to rock stars that leading man David Duchovny meets in rehab. Talking to her, you get the sense that this is her most enjoyable character, the one she feels the most comfortable being. “It’s really different character, more of a masculine role,” she said of Faith. “It’s a bit more of my sense of humor – snarky. I’m having a blast with that.”
Even with Grace being best-known for her helpless girl roles, her career spans a range of different gigs. She starred in Twilight: Breaking Dawn with our last cover girl, Nikki Reed, as vampire Irina and was in January’s pilot episode of the television series The Following with Kevin Bacon. She really is a girl that keeps the jobs piling up. “I think everything is working in tandem quite well. Everything feeds something else,” she said of her recent roles. “I have great friendships from Twilight.”
As far as making movies, she assured that it’s not all the glamour that we see. “Doing movies, there’s a lot of technical stuff – action, special effects, waiting for lighting. It can be a long day,” she said. “Time spent interacting with another actor is very minimal. If that’s the magic you fell in love with, you’re not going to get a lot of it. You find other things to fall in love with. I love travel, the gypsy lifestyle, but you do start to miss the work of it, and it’s nice to have the luxury of doing plays now and then.”
The gypsy lifestyle is what Grace attributes most to her personal style. She’s not your typical celebrity obsessed with fashion – although she did enjoy the clothes onset at our shoot, even calling a mirrored top her own homage to Katy Perry. But Grace is more sentimental than that. “I keep things from different times in my life and places that I’ve spent a lot of time. Right now, I’ve got on a coat that I had made in Argentina years ago,” she said. “I occasionally keep a piece off of a job. I just like things that feel special.”
Travel can be an important luxury to someone who is reeling in major movie roles. As with all actors and actresses, a certain amount of exposure brings with it the crazy fans. When I asked about the fan antics, Grace admitted to an awkward moment. “My mom and I went on a girls trip to a spa for Mother’s Day, and this girl was crying in the steam room. She got so excited, and I was like, I really wish I had clothes on right now.”
With her career picking up, it seems likely that Maggie Grace’s fan base is only going to grow. There were rumors of a Showtime spin-off for her and on the day of our conversation, our interview was moved for an audition she attended. She’s poised for success with her guard up. I don’t predict any problems with the law or wardrobe malfunctions for this Los Angeles blonde.
When I asked what roles should really like to tackle next, she responded, “I’m reading a lot of plays right now. Mostly I just want to work with people I respect, creatively and as human beings, which I feel very lucky to be doing right now.”