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Mckenna Grace: The Handmaid’s Tale’s teen star in profile

Young actress making debut as Mrs Keyes in season four already has wealth of credits to her name and will next be seen in Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Joe Sommerlad
Wednesday 28 April 2021 06:39 EDT
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The Handmaid's Tale season 4 trailer

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US streaming service Hulu has delighted fans of The Handmaid’s Tale by dropping the first three episodes of season four earlier than planned.

The latest instalments of the hit series based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name – which is set in the fictional totalitarian state of Gilead, in which women are enslaved by a puritanical patriarchy and forced to breed – appeared ahead of schedule and included an episode directed by the show’s star, Elisabeth Moss.

The cast has featured the likes of Joseph Fiennes, Alexis Bledel, Ann Dowd and Bradley Whitford in supporting roles over the course of its four-year run. Among those joining this time around is teen actress Mckenna Grace, who already has a wealth of screen credits to her name despite being only 14.

Grace plays Mrs Keyes, a character previewed by Deadline as “a sharply intelligent, teenaged wife of a much older Commander who rules her farm and household with confidence. She has a rebellious, subversive streak, and is calm and pious on the outside with turmoil, even insanity, on the inside.”

The teenage star, from Grapevine, Texas, has carved out a niche in playing the younger versions of main characters in her career so far. She played the childhood version of Margot Robbie’s Tonya Harding in I, Tonya (2017), Captain Marvel’s young Carol Danvers, a character played in her later years by Brie Larson, and the young Sabrina Spellman in the second season of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Grace has also become a staple of the modern horror genre, appearing in Amityville: The Awakening (2017), The Bad Seed (2018) and Annabelle Comes Home (2019).

She has wracked up a further 30 credits in TV shows since 2012, including Designated Survivor and The Haunting of Hill House, and appeared in another 18 movies. Some of her notable film roles include Independence Day: Resurgence, The Angry Birds Movie (both 2016), Gifted (2017) and Ready Player One (2018).

Mckenna Grace attends the premiere of Troop Zero in Los Angeles in January 2020
Mckenna Grace attends the premiere of Troop Zero in Los Angeles in January 2020 (Jon Kopaloff/Getty)

Grace will next be seen in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which is currently in post-production and sees herself, Paul Rudd and Finn Wolfhard joining the original cast of the beloved 1980s supernatural blockbuster series.

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