Here's Why Kim From Taken Looks So Familiar
In the Taken movie franchise, Liam Neeson is center stage as ex-CIA officer Bryan Mills, but it's the actor who plays Mills' kidnapped 17-year-old daughter who steals scenes more often than not. The actor in question, Maggie Grace, showed herself to be quite the budding action star in her role as Kim Mills – especially in Taken 3, where she's seen holding her own against the bad guys as she helps her father.
One might think when watching the Taken movies that Grace's performance has the kind of gravity that only a seasoned professional could bring to the role — and that's exactly what the actor is. Grace has been in the Hollywood biz since the late '90s, and continues appearing on screens big and small to this day. Though her once-blond hair is now cut into a short brunette style that's eminently more suitable for action (don't feel bad if you don't recognize her from all her previous work), Grace does have some major roles under her belt.
Here's where you may have seen the actor who plays Kim in the Taken franchise before.
Maggie Grace played a spoiled survivor on Lost
In the first two seasons of Lost, Grace played one of the original survivors: Shannon Rutherford, Boone Carlyle's (Iam Somerhalder) stepsister. Before the crash that sets the events of the series into motion, Shannon was a selfish young woman complaining about not getting seats in first class. Later, she becomes more a part of the group, developing a relationship with Sayid (Naveen Andrews) and trying to get revenge on Boone's killer just before getting killed off herself in a tragic accident.
Grace likened her experience on Lost to that of college. "It was the first time I was really living far away from my friends and my family and had my own place," she said (via The Los Angeles Times). "It's crazy to think the day I turned 21 is also the day the show premiered. We were all celebrating. It was the first time I had ever really gotten tipsy. It was completely life-changing and out of nowhere."
Grace also shared that she was later offered more parts like Lost's Shannon Rutherford — i.e., spoiled, entitled women — but fortunately, she wasn't typecast in that kind of role.
Maggie Grace played vengeful Irina in the final two Twilight films
In 2010, Grace was cast in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, the final installment of the Twilight series that was split into two movies, which premiered in 2011 and 2012. She played Irina, a new threat to Kristen Stewart's character Bella and a member of the Denali coven, the only other "vegetarian" vampire group apart from Edward Cullen's (Robert Pattinson) family. Irina is angry at the protagonists, whom she blames for the death of her lover Laurent, who was killed by werewolves. In the movie, the vicious Volturi co-founder Caius (Jamie Campbell Bower) beheads Irina during an epic confrontation, in which Irina admits she may have passed on false information about Edward and Bella's young daughter.
That scene in particular was difficult to shoot, Grace previously admitted. "It was just grueling. The most exciting scene in the world if you repeat it over and over and over again many times a day for six weeks can get repetitive," Grace said in an interview with The Happy Girl. "[But] this was really everyone's favorite scene to see because it was just magnificent."
Incidentally, that scene was also the source of the movie's best viral moment. Behind the scenes between takes, the actors decided to instigate a dance-off with the enemy Volturi to the Eurythmic's song "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This." It was probably a great way to liven up the "grueling" atmosphere.
Maggie Grace has been busy fighting zombies in Fear the Walking Dead
Since 2018, Grace has been trying to survive the undead in The Walking Dead's companion series Fear the Walking Dead as journalist Althea "Al" Szewczyk-Przygocki. She joined the AMC series in its fourth season, and it's now in its sixth season. New episodes are slated to begin again in April 2021, following a hiatus in production caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Grace told Den of Geek that it's "sort of eerie" how the new season resembles what's happening in the world.
"I will say that the new season reflects the current world events in more ways than one, and some of them are sort of striking and pretty creep-tastic. I [though], 'I can't believe they wrote that before the pandemic — did they have a crystal ball?'" Grace said. "These are characters struggling to find a sense of family and connection and hope over distance, and I think we are all trying to do that in our own way."
Additionally, Grace was part of Fear the Walking Dead: The Althea Tapes, a six-part web series featuring her interviews with survivors done to promote the second part of the show's fifth season. Hopefully, her days on the series aren't numbered, but you never know for sure with The Walking Dead franchise.