Mckenna Grace Is About to Do the Impossible: Transition From Child Star to Adult Actor

glamour.com:

got her start when she was five, which makes her one of the few actors who has successfully transitioned from child star to adult actor without any sort of break during her formative years.And yet, even though Grace has achieved critical and professional acclaim in her mid-teens (she was nominated for an Emmy in 2021 for her role as Esther Keyes in The Handmaid's Tale), most fans—and even some of her peers—still see her as a young kid, best known for when she starred in Gifted with Chris Evans and Octavia Spencer, or I, Tonya, with Allison Janney and Margot Robbie.

She's as likely to get “You've grown up before our eyes!” or “Stop growing up so fast” as much as “How do I know you?” or “You've been in everything!”"I'm like, ‘What do you mean?’ and 'What do you want me to do [about it]?" Grace tells Glamour from a New York City hotel room the night after the premiere of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, where she reprises her role as Phoebe Spengler for the second time. “I feel like people just have a consensus that I'm still nine years old, and it's crazy because I'm turning 18 this year.

I feel like people still think of me [as that age] because I've been so young for most of my career.”Octavia Spencer, Mckenna Grace, Chris Evans in the film, Gifted, from 2017.She concedes that it's a very weird place to be “right on the cusp of being an adult because you're kind of too old for the younger roles, but then you're too young for the older roles.” More so, now she's also auditioning against actors who are in their mid-to-late twenties, which is, to put it bluntly, a bit trippy. “You're like, ‘Wait, where did this come from out of nowhere one day?’ So it's such an interesting time in my life to be an actress.