There is little that actor and New Hollywood Class of 2025 honoree Mckenna Grace can't spin into something good. She'll start a sentence with a mild complaint, but then upturn it like a grin. Rejection is fuel. Disappointment is a sign of desire. Missed opportunities bring new friendships. Hurt feelings inspire apologies. A packed schedule is a chance to feel grateful that she's even working — and she is always working.
The 19-year-old is perhaps one of the most-booked actors her age. Grace's mom, who travels with her, keeps a spreadsheet that thoroughly tracks all her daughter's projects. In the past 12 months, Grace has acted in six released movies: the Colleen Hoover adaptation Regretting You (opposite fellow New Hollywood cover star Mason Thames); the Green Day-inspired road-trip movie New Year's Rev (also with Thames); horror sequel Five Nights at Freddy's 2; What We Hide, a drama about the foster-care system; and two psychological thrillers, Amy Wang's Slanted, and Anniversary, which stars Phoebe Dynevor and Dylan O'Brien. Grace is simultaneously working on several other projects, too, most significantly the highly anticipated Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping.
“It is tiring at times, but I dig it,” Grace tells Teen Vogue over several Diet Cokes at her hotel in New York. “Grass is always greener. I'd rather be doing 20 million things at once than just sitting at home and being like, 'Shoot. When can I get back to work?'"
Grace arrives at her Teen Vogue New Hollywood cover shoot the day before our interview, after a 20-hour travel day from filming Sunrise on the Reaping in Germany. Her week in New York will consist of various shoots and interviews to promote Regretting You, but she insists it's a nice break from “falling down mountains and fighting people for my life. I'm instead getting my leg bruise painted and getting to talk about fun romance movies that I did with, literally, my favorite person.” (This is not the first time she'll refer to co-star Mason Thames in this manner.)
When Grace is tired or feeling wrung out, she prides herself on an ability to manipulate herself into positive emotions. “It sounds really terrible when I put it this way,” she says with a laugh, “but I feel like some days I just gaslight myself into being happy or energetic.”
For example: the shoot yesterday, during which she insists she was feeling “so dead” after the long flight. “But I had this photo,” she explains, showing me her phone, where she's pulled up a Lisa Frank-style illustration of dolphins frolicking over rainbows in a pastel sky. “I decided that this was going to be my energy for the day. Every day I wake up and I'm just like, 'You know what? Let's do it. Let's get it.'”
Grace continues, “I'm 14 years into being in the industry, and I still work just as hard as the day that I got to LA.” It seems that she just doesn't know any other way to be.
Born in Grapevine, Texas, Grace was drawn to every possible activity a toddler could attempt: ballet, tap dance, gymnastics, cheerleading, Tiny Miss Texas pageants, and of course, acting. She begged her mom to let her take an acting class, which led the pair to fly to LA for auditions, while her dad finished medical school back home.
That trip, when Grace was five years old, was her first time on an airplane. She and her mother imagined their lives would soon look like Malibu Barbie's. Miley Cyrus's “Party in the USA” played over the taxicab radio. “It's so cheesy,” Grace says, thinking about their early adventures in California when they had no idea any of this would work. “Chasing a dream with no money out in the middle of LA.”
Soon, though, everything fell into place. Her dad got a residency in LA and the family settled in Ventura. Meanwhile, Grace booked her first onscreen role, as “Even Younger Chloe” to Sabrina Carpenter's “Younger Chloe” in a 2013 episode of The Goodwin Games. Grace has acted in multiple projects every single year since then, with notable turns in the Ghostbusters franchise and as younger versions of various Hollywood stars: Kiernan Shipka in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Jennifer Morrison in Once Upon a Time, Margot Robbie in I, Tonya.
From the outside looking in, it's an odd way to grow up. Grace marks time not in years but in movie projects, using them as reference points to remember what she was like or what she experienced at that time. She was trying on different lives every day, and doing so as a professional in a work environment, while also being a kid and learning how to grow up.
“When I was a little girl playing Christmas Flint in Troop Zero, I literally just was that character all the time,” Grace recalls. “That was my personality for a year.”
The roles have shaped her over time, of course, but so has the support of her family and friends. “The one thing that I find grounds me in who I am is just, I know my heart, I know my family, I know the things that are important to carry with me. I'll go be other people, and then I get home, and I'm me."
What are those things that feel important to carry? “Kindness,” Grace says simply. “I always want to make people feel important and seen. Even sometimes, maybe to a fault. I think that I can be a little overly excited. I try to carry an excitement about life and what I do every day whenever I walk onto set. I am so lucky to get to do what I do, and I'm so lucky that I love it, and that I get to have my family — that I get to be alive.”
In the past five years or so, Grace has moved away from playing “younger selves” and is firmly into her own Hollywood career, one that has crossed genres and includes a mix of new collaborators. She's always looking for the next challenge.
Her Emmy-nominated performance in The Handmaid's Tale as Esther Keyes was a clear turning point in showing what she could do as an actor. Keyes, barely a teenager, is a wife who is raped regularly and used as a pawn in Margaret Atwood's dystopian world, but the character also reaches a sort of twisted agency, enacting revenge on those who have harmed her.
“Being a girl is a never-ending battle,” Grace says, reflecting on how The Handmaid's Tale has aged, even just a few years later, and how it already feels more relevant in this political climate. “I feel like it's that way with everything in life. It's always steps forward and steps back, push and pull, but push and push, and work and work and work.”
It's the same way with other projects Grace has been a part of, such as The Hunger Games and The Bad Seed: “You're doing these series and films that are so dark and dystopian, but at the same time,” she says, “it comes out and it feels very relevant to the world around us.”
Grace's next literal battle will be in Sunrise on the Reaping, in a franchise she has yearned to be part of her whole life. The prequel, adapted from Suzanne Collins's novel of the same name, tells the story of Haymitch (a role now played by Joseph Zada, originated by Woody Harrelson) during the 50th Hunger Games, a Quarter Quell in which each district has been forced to send four tributes instead of two. Grace will play another District 12 tribute, Maysilee Donner, who, in the book, is the original recipient of Katniss Everdeen's iconic Mockingjay pin.
Grace auditioned for the role while filming Regretting You and was sworn to secrecy about the process via an NDA. “I didn't even tell Mason, who knows every single one of my secrets,” she says. When she found out she'd nabbed the role of Maysilee, Grace burst into tears in her trailer, with her mom by her side.
As soon as she returned to set, everyone seemed to know based solely on the look on her face: “I was like, 'You guys are going to make me lose my job… that I don't even have,” she says jokingly. When the news was officially announced the next day, Thames gave her a bouquet of white roses, a reference to President Snow's favorite flower.
Little did Sunrise on the Reaping director Francis Lawrence know, but Grace had been promoting the series for years even before she was cast. She first read the books and watched the movies when she was making Annabelle Comes Home (she must have been 11 or 12, she concludes). Things escalated from there.
“I'll tell you something I haven't admitted in an interview before,” Grace begins, her voice halting. “I don't even know if I've told any of my Hunger Games cast this. It's well-known on the internet that I might have had a secret editing account at times in my life.” The edits in question, she reveals, were Peeta Mellark-centric. “There may or may not be a few McKenna Grace-made Hunger Games edits floating around the internet. From, like, three years ago. I hope to God [they don't pop up]… I'm still so tapped in with that community. It's so weird getting to be a part of those sets now. I'm like, 'Francis, I used to edit this.'"
During the first week of filming, Grace showed up to a meeting with Lawrence with a notebook full of ideas and her annotated copy of Sunrise on the Reaping, pointing to specific scenes the fans love. “I want everybody to love her as much as I do, as much as I love playing her,” Grace says of Maysilee, a complicated character. On the surface, she's a mean girl, but underneath, she uses her power for good. “Everybody has their defense mechanisms and walls that they put up for one reason or another. I definitely think that is very applicable to her, and her tougher exterior.”
Sunrise on the Reaping will inevitably lead Grace's career to new and interesting places after it comes out in November 2026, and it may also bring the actor a new level of exposure and fame. She finds that hard to conceptualize, though, because she has already been some level of famous for nearly her entire life. Through that childhood fame, she feels she's been able to achieve a delicate balance: Show who you are, but keep some things for yourself.
“I feel like I keep the things private that I want to keep private, because I'm out there, and I'm like, 'You've seen me grow up. You've seen my whole life,'” she says. “[Still,] so much of my life that I've wanted to [keep private] has been kept private, and I still feel like I have control over my life and who I am….”
Grace continues, “The whole basis of my job is hoping that people like me and that people want to hire me, or that the public likes my work.” That's why her approach to social media (and TikTok, especially) is mainly: Be silly. Have fun.
“I'm not going to be able to control what's out there of me. I haven't been able to for 90% of my life,” she points out. “So, it's like, whatever. I feel that social media is just a way for me to be like, 'This is who I am. Here's my personality, and you can make your own assumptions about me, but here's me.' I try not to let it get to me or worry about it too much, because it's like, 'What can you do?'”
(And if it ever does get to be too much, she has a fail-safe — just tell people she's Kiernan Shipka. While out doing karaoke in Germany a couple months ago, a stranger approached her to ask for her Instagram. “I put in Kiernan Shipka's,” Grace says with a laugh. “Kiernan, if anybody thinks that they saw you in Germany doing karaoke, my bad.”)
One of Grace's first brushes with something she and her family couldn't control: a weird internet rumor that she had gotten breast implants when she was about 15 or 16. Obviously, it is strange behavior to comment on a teenager's body (or anyone's) on the internet, or anywhere else. And it's even stranger when you consider the reality for Grace: She was actually undergoing a major surgery to correct her scoliosis.
“I had a spinal surgery, and it went around the internet for a second that it was a coverup for a boob job,” she says. “I was like, 'Honestly, thank you, but I do think that's just called puberty.'”
Though she can joke about it now, years later, it was a painful time for Grace — and not because strangers on the internet didn't understand what she was going through. “It was the hardest thing I've ever done,” she says of the surgery and recovery, before noting that “it was so worth it in the long run.” She couldn't walk for a month, and when she could move again, she had to relearn how to do it.
“It's very shocking and visceral to not be able to do that anymore,” Grace recalls, “and to be so, all of a sudden, reliant on other people. Like not even being able to get up and go to the bathroom by yourself. It was such a weird thing to relearn how to walk, and to get back into functioning as a person.”
Grace adds, “Truly, I'm so grateful I did it, but at the time, I remember in my recovery, I just spent hours sobbing on the couch like, 'I'm never going to be better. I'm going to be like this forever. And my back, I'm just going to be in pain forever.'”
The surgery came after one of her bigger career disappointments, when the Olivia Wilde-directed gymnastics biopic Perfect, in which Grace was set to co-star, was indefinitely postponed just before they were supposed to begin filming. She had already trained for eight months at that point, working out almost every single day. That brought its own stresses. With her back pain and spinal curve, she says, she wasn't seeing the results she wanted.
“It was so confusing and upsetting for me, because I was like, 'I'm working so hard. Why is this not working as well as it should?'” Grace explains. “It was such a mental mind screw, because I just couldn't figure it out. Now, looking back, I'm like, 'Well, it's because literally your hip was over here.”
Now compound that with all the typical changes your body undergoes as a teen. “It's really hard going through all of your awkward stages being a teenager on camera and on the internet because it's like, when you're a girl and have all of these weird mental images of yourself, just seeing it blasted everywhere is a little scary at times,” says Grace. “For the first time in my life, I'm exiting the fog a bit of being a teenage girl and being like, 'I did not have the best body image of myself when I was a younger teenager.'”
When she talks about this, I can see her searching for a bright side, a reason for the existence of pain — and she finds it. “Honestly, I got introduced to my trainer [on Perfect], and he's been my best friend for, like, three or four years since,” she says. “We work out together [now], and that's been such a healthy, incredible outlet for me. [Also], I had never really gotten to train for a project like that before. So everything happens for a reason. I'm so glad I did it.”
When I point out that photos of Mason Thames are on the back of her phone case, Grace blushes and giggles and does everything short of kicking her feet: “What? Maybe. Who knows?” Lifting her phone, the lock screen flashes, and it's a shot of the two gazing at each other while taking photos to promote Regretting You.
In the movie, which came out in October, she plays a high school senior named Clara, daughter of Allison Williams's character, Morgan. The plot is… very dramatic, to say the least. For Clara, it's a coming-of-age story, and she grieves a deep loss while falling in love for the first time, with Thames's character, Miller. Clara and Miller's chemistry is immediate, and it mirrors the comfort level Grace and Thames have with each other in real life.
The pair first met at a hangout thrown by a mutual friend in 2024. (Hollywood is a small world: All of our New Hollywood 2025 cover stars knew each other before this occasion; Grace went to Leah Sava Jeffries's birthday party a few years back.) Grace and Thames didn't speak after that, until he DM'd her to say he was excited to work with her. They had a funny miscommunication — Thames was talking about Regretting You, Grace was talking about New Year's Rev. After another hang, this time in LA prior to filming, Grace knew the two had something special. “I was telling him recently, 'You ruined my life,' because from the minute we met I was like, 'Oh my God. There's no way I can ever have fun with anybody besides Mason now, because that's it.'”
Grace likes the idea of acting with Thames in more projects in the future. “I love that Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson [who recently starred in The Long Walk] are trying to do that right now. I feel like we haven't had that in this generation, where actors couple up and do a bunch of movies together, because I feel like people are scared, like 'I don't want them to get sick of us together,'” she says. “But whenever you think back, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling — iconic. All of their characters feel so wildly different. Seth Rogen and that whole gang all do everything together. It's so fun to make movies with the people you love.”
Next up for Mckenna Grace? Well, a lot of work, to be honest. After Sunrise on the Reaping wraps later this year, she plans to take a few weeks off to spend the holidays with her family, and then she'll promote her role in the forthcoming Scream 7 movie, due out in February.
“I can't say anything about it besides it was so fun to shoot,” she says with a grin. “[Like in Regretting You,] it's really fun to get to move into roles where I'm playing a teenager, or just my age, because usually I'm playing younger or I'm the kid on set. It was such a crazy experience. I'm such a big Scream fan, and getting to work on Scream with Kevin Williamson is such a crazy honor. It was such a fun role and I had a blast with it.”
A forthcoming project that would reunite Grace with Kiernan Shipka is in development, and Grace teases a secret already-filmed movie she can't talk about yet. She's also continuing to make music — she's dropped about a dozen songs over the past few years — and would like to release more in the future. Her IMDb is full and perpetually growing.
Grace was recently talking with her mom about her work ethic and why she works as much as she does. She dreams of award shows and magazine covers like any actor, but it's also about maintaining some sense of who she is. The theory is that if she works hard enough, and is kind and collaborative enough, she won't think about just herself, the competition, and how the world rewards thinking about yourself above everything.
“Sometimes I feel like I do extra work because this industry is so cutthroat at times,” says Grace. “Of course, I put my career at very high importance, but I wouldn't want to put that over somebody else's expense, or step on somebody else to make my way up. It scares me, and I don't think I would like myself very much if that's who I became, or if that's who I let this industry make me.”
Grace concludes, “I don't know what the future holds. I just want to keep working, and putting work out there that I can be proud of, because art is so subjective. The worst part about this industry and this job is that your whole thing is to make people like you — and there's always going to be somebody who doesn't like what you do…. At the end of the day, I'm just an actor coming onto a project to play a character so that people can have entertainment and connect over a movie. For me, it's most of the time not much deeper than that — I just love it.”
Photo Credits
Photographer Angalis Field
Photo Assistant I/Digi Tech Jacob Holler
Lighting Director Alex Johnstone
Stylist Ali Claire Marino
Stylist Assistant Malu Registre
Stylist Assistant Luna Johnson
Tailor Hailey Desjardins
Prop Stylist Maisie Sattler
Prop Assistant Aisha Gunnell
Makeup Artist Tiffany Patton at Paradis
Hair Stylist Sergio Estrada at Paradis
Makeup Assistant Sebastian Castro
Manicurist Rita Remark at Bryant Bantry Agency
Retoucher Alberto Maro
Producer Caroline Hughes
Production Coordinator TJ O'Donnell
Production Assistant Elise Snider
Art and Design Director Emily Zirimis
Global Fashion Director Tchesmeni Leonard
Senior Designer Liz Coulbourn
Associate Fashion Editor Samantha Gasmer
Associate Visuals Editor Bea Oyster
Assistant Fashion Editor Crystal Okonkwo
Editorial Credits
Editor-in-Chief Versha Sharma
Features Director Brittney McNamara
Associate Entertainment Director Eugene Shevertalov
Associate Culture Director P. Claire Dodson
Culture Editor Kaitlyn McNab
Style Director Alyssa Hardy
Talent Manager Paige Garbarini
Associate Director of Audience Development and Analytics Mandy Velez Tatti
Senior Social Media Manager Jillian Selzer
Editor-at-Large Sara Delgado
Beauty Editor Donya Momenian
Editorial Assistant Skyli Alvarez
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