Mckenna Grace’s iPhone was at 11 percent when we spoke on a recent phone call. She was in Berlin shooting the upcoming Hunger Games film, Sunrise on the Reaping, and had been on set since five A.M., before having dinner with two fans sent by the Make-a-Wish Foundation. The whirlwind day was a microcosm of the 19-year-old’s bustling, prolific career. “I work a lot,” she says. “Even whenever I’m off a production, I’m still working—trying to figure out what to do next, and auditioning.”
This year alone, she has three movies coming out: Regretting You, a romance based on the Colleen Hoover novel and starring Allison Williams and Dave Franco; Anniversary, a thriller where she acts alongside Diane Lane, Phoebe Dynevor, and Kyle Chandler; and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, a horror film with Josh Hutcherson.
The thing is, she wouldn’t have it any other way—perhaps because it’s all she’s ever known. Born in Grapevine, Texas, she moved with her parents to Los Angeles to pursue acting. “I don’t remember making a conscious, absolute final decision and just being [like,] ‘I’m going to be an actress,” she says on starting her career at five. “I was just one of those kids who got really obsessed with Shirley Temple. And I just somehow managed to convince my mom to put me in an acting class, and I went to auditions and just kind of never looked back.”
Dubbed “one of the most successful and prolific child actors of her generation” by Yahoo Entertainment, Grace made her on-screen debut in Disney XD’s Crash & Bernstein, in 2012, but her breakout didn’t come until age nine, with Gifted (fittingly titled), in which she starred alongside Chris Evans and received a Critics Choice nomination for Best Young Performer in 2018. Three years later, she received an Emmy nomination for her chilling part as a child bride in The Handmaid’s Tale, and has since shared the screen with Hollywood heavyweights such as Margot Robbie, in I, Tonya, and Brie Larson, in Captain Marvel. But it’s in horror—her true niche—where the actress has dazzled most.
With 10 horror movies under her belt, most notably Annabelle Comes Home, two Ghostbusters sequels, and the upcoming Scream 7, Grace tells me she finds comfort in scary movies more than she does in any other genre. “I was just recently stuck in a hotel for, like, a week or two because I was between work, and I re-watched all the Evil Dead,” she says of the five-film franchise. “I’m a big horror buff.”
For the former child actor who’s long gravitated toward the gory, stepping into the girl-next-door role of Clara Grant—the leading love interest in Regretting You—was more than just uncharted territory.
“It was such a crazy switch-up from being a child actor. It was my first romance, my first lead in a romance, my first—a lot of firsts for me,” she says.
To prepare for the role of Clara—“a teenager in love,” as Dion would call it—Grace read Colleen Hoover’s book “a million times,” highlighting the text and bringing it to set with her every day. She also tells me that she and her best friend and co-star, Mason Thames, who plays Clara’s love interest, Miller Adams, would watch rom-coms to get a sense of good chemistry on-screen. “We would watch The Notebook and 10 Things I Hate About You and The Fault in Our Stars. We’d go and have little romance-movie nights for research…. We were just so stoked that we’d get to work together that we’d just read through Regretting You together, even though it doesn’t shoot for another five months.” (Rumors of Grace and Thames dating have not been confirmed.)
Their co-star relationship is nothing like that of Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively in It Ends with Us—the last Hoover adaptation, a train wreck ending in a $400 million lawsuit. “Other than the fact that it’s by the same author,” says Grace, “our set was just a completely different environment. All we really tried to do was focus on spreading love and just having a great time and making a film that we were all proud of.”
As for what’s to come, unsurprisingly, it’s a whole lot more movies in 2026. Scream 7 hits theaters in February, followed by Sunrise on the Reaping in November. And New Year’s Rev, a movie based on the story of the band Green Day, in which Grace once again stars alongside Thames, has yet to announce a release date but just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“I’m figuring out what’s next on the radar,” she says at the end of our conversation, adding, triumphantly, “Oh my gosh, somehow I’m only on 8 percent!”
Regretting You is in theaters now. Anniversary will open on October 29
Carolina de Armas is a Junior Editor at AIR MAIL
