Mckenna Grace, the actress who outgrew playing everyone else’s younger self

Mckenna Grace

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 25, 2006 Grapevine, Texas, United States
Occupation	Actress and singer-songwriter
Known for	Ready Player One, Gifted, Captain Marvel
Awards	2 Phoenix Film Critics Society · Atlanta Film Festival Phoenix

For most of her childhood, Mckenna Grace’s job was to be someone else before they became themselves. She was Tonya Harding years before the triple axel, Carol Danvers before the powers, Theodora Crain before Hill House got its hooks into her, Sabrina Spellman before the coven. Casting directors kept calling because she could make a few minutes of backstory feel essential. The question her career is asking now, at twenty, is whether the girl who was so persuasive as everybody’s earlier self can carry a film as the person in front of the camera, and whether the films she is offered will let her.

The path started in Grapevine, Texas, where Mckenna Grace Burge was born, the only child of an orthopedic surgeon, Ross Burge, and a medical sales representative, Crystal Grace. She was crowned Tiny Miss Texas on the pageant circuit, and a set of Shirley Temple DVDs from her great-grandmother, which arrived when she was four, gave her the idea of acting; at five she shot her first commercial. Once she was cast in the Disney XD sitcom Crash & Bernstein, the family moved to Los Angeles. She never attended a regular school, studying at home and with tutors on set.

The early credits were the kind that pay the bills for a child actor: a recurring part as Faith Newman on The Young and the Restless, a flashback as the young Caroline Forbes in The Vampire Diaries. The turn came in 2017, when she was ten, with Marc Webb’s Gifted. She played Mary Adler, a seven-year-old math prodigy caught in a custody fight between her uncle, played by Chris Evans, and her grandmother, and used songwriting to memorize the equations Mary solves on screen. The Chicago Sun-Times called her “an irresistible force”, and the part brought a Critics’ Choice nomination for best young performer. The same year she learned to skate to play the young Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.

What followed was two careers running side by side. In one, she kept playing the childhood of characters other actresses owned as adults: the young Theo in Mike Flanagan‘s The Haunting of Hill House, the thirteen-year-old Carol Danvers in Captain Marvel. In the other she was the lead, and usually the most frightening person on screen. For Lifetime’s remake of The Bad Seed she played Emma, a girl who kills whoever crosses her, after consulting Patty McCormack, who had played the part in 1956. In Annabelle Comes Home she was Judy Warren, daughter of the paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. TheWrap started calling her a scream queen, and the label stuck.

The role that changed how people talked about her was the darkest. In the fourth season of The Handmaid’s Tale she played Esther Keyes, a fourteen-year-old raped and married off to an older Commander, who turns that abuse into cold fury. Grace was fourteen too, and she argued that the age match was the point: “If it makes people upset or uncomfortable that an actual 14-year-old is having to talk about how she was raped and it’s acting, then maybe that will make you want to do something for actual girls who are going through this.” The performance brought a Primetime Emmy nomination for outstanding guest actress in a drama series in 2021, the first time a child had been recognized for a guest acting Emmy. A year later she played Jan Broberg, twice kidnapped by a family friend, in Peacock’s A Friend of the Family, working alongside Broberg herself, who produced the series.

Commercially, the breakthrough was Phoebe Spengler, the deadpan granddaughter of Egon, in Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Reviews of the film were lukewarm; reviews of her were not, and The Boston Globe credited most of its good moments to “a quite-phenomenal Mckenna Grace”. Reitman also put her first single, “Haunted House”, over the end credits after hearing it. During the pandemic shutdown she and her father wrote The Bad Seed Returns, which aired on Lifetime in 2022 as the first production of her company, Beautiful Ghosts Productions, with Grace as executive producer and again as Emma. She came back as Phoebe in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire in 2024, a film that, in the view of The Hollywood Reporter, showed she could become the franchise’s most valuable player.

Here the record gets awkward: her biggest films as a young adult are the ones critics liked least. Regretting You, the Colleen Hoover adaptation in which she played a grieving daughter opposite Allison Williams and Mason Thames, took $90.5 million worldwide, and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 took about $238 million. Both were panned, with Grace singled out as the exception. Scream 7 was a hit in early 2026 too, and /Film wrote that she was “tragically wasted” in a supporting part. The smaller films that tested her as an adult lead, Dan Kay’s What We Hide and Amy Wang’s satire Slanted, in which she plays the white, blonde identity a Chinese American teenager buys through surgery, drew warmer notices and far smaller releases. That pattern says less about her range than about what the business does with a former child star who has a large young audience: it books her for the franchise and leaves the risk to the independents.

Music runs alongside the acting, and it is where she controls the material. Signed to Photo Finish Records, she released “Self Dysmorphia”, a song about her scoliosis, a few weeks after spinal surgery in October 2022, and put out two EPs in 2023, the pop-punk Bittersweet 16 and the folk-leaning Autumn Leaves. Her vocal on Ice Nine Kills’ “Twisting the Knife”, from the Scream 7 soundtrack, gave her a first chart entry, at the top of Billboard’s Hot Hard Rock Songs. In 2026 she released “Ugly and Rotten” in June, and “Bones and All” in September, a song she describes as being about “that borderline-obsessive kind of love”.

The screen work of 2026 has leaned on teen genre. She starred with Mason Thames, her Regretting You co-star and her partner, in Lee Kirk’s Nimrods, a road comedy drawn from Green Day’s early years that opened in August. She led Yoko Okumura’s slasher The Last Kiss as Laurel, a girl who sees the death of anyone she kisses, released digitally in September, and voiced Skye again in the third PAW Patrol feature. Netflix’s live-action Scooby-Doo: Origins, in which she plays Daphne Blake, finished shooting in September and is due in 2027.

Next comes a role that loops back to where she started. In The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, Francis Lawrence’s prequel, which opens in the United States on November 20, she plays Maysilee Donner, a District 12 tribute who goes into the arena alongside the young Haymitch Abernathy, as well as Maysilee’s sister, Merrilee. Readers of Suzanne Collins’s novel know Maysilee as the girl who owned the mockingjay pin before Katniss Everdeen ever wore it. Once again Grace plays the one who came before the heroine. The difference is that she is no longer a child standing in for an adult star; she is a name in an ensemble that includes Ralph Fiennes, Elle Fanning and Jesse Plemons.